Artificial Intelligence: what readers need to know

If I had a nickel for every AI book I've cataloged in the last six months, I’d have a lot of nickels! Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced to a point where it’s no longer a novelty but a pervasive part of our lives. Can you believe ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022—almost two years ago? That’s 14 dog years! So, what has been happening in the AI world behind the scenes during this rapid evolution? In this post, I want to shed light on AI-related developments in publishing and libraries that might have slipped under your radar. Some of the revelations I've come across in my research have been quite surprising!

Imagine we’re playing the game Password, and my clues are: “Crawling, scraping, harvesting.” Any guesses? If you said deep learning or machine learning, you’d be spot on. Here’s what these terms mean: “Crawling” refers to the systematic exploration of the internet or digital spaces to gather information. “Scraping” involves extracting specific data from websites or other sources, and “harvesting” denotes the collection of data from various sources, often on a large scale. These processes might not sound too alarming at first, but the implications of the data being collected could surprise you.

Take Wiley, a major global publisher known for its "For Dummies" series. Wiley has struck deals worth $21 million with AI companies, allowing these firms to “train” their AI models on Wiley’s published content. What do the authors think about this? According to the Author’s Guild, they are not pleased. While authors agree to transfer certain rights when they publish their work, there was no explicit understanding that their content would be used to train AI models or be monetized in this way. Authors worry that these AI models might mimic their styles so well that their works could be rendered obsolete in the future.

This issue isn't isolated to Wiley. News organizations like Newscorp (Wall Street Journal & New York Post), Associated Press, Reuters, The Atlantic, and Vox Media are also partnering with AI companies without the explicit consent of contributing authors. While I empathize with authors whose works are being used in this manner, there is also the broader issue of bias. AI models trained on biased material will produce biased results. As a librarian, I am particularly concerned about the potential for biased outputs in news articles, given that news content itself can carry inherent biases.

Despite these concerns, there is hope on the horizon. In Europe, the EU AI Act has been introduced, categorizing AI applications based on their risk levels—low, moderate, and high. High-risk areas include transport, education, law enforcement, and migration, while low-risk areas encompass video games and spam filters. This framework provides context for the application of AI and offers recourse for those who feel it is being misused.

Moreover, I am noticing a trend where printed books now include statements right after the copyright information that prohibit AI from training on their text. This is increasingly common among smaller publishers. Seeing such statements on publishers' websites is also promising. The fact is, AI is here to stay, and our focus should be on managing its use responsibly. This isn’t about AI taking over the world but about navigating its integration into our lives with care and foresight.

In the library world, we are committed to staying abreast of new technology trends while adhering to ethical considerations. We believe that just because we can use certain technologies doesn't mean we always should. This principle extends to our approach to patron privacy and responsible technology use.

As for AI-written books, don’t worry about finding them on library shelves anytime soon. The US Copyright Office is clear that copyrighted materials must have human authors, although authors may choose to use AI tools in their writing process. However, this information is not always disclosed in published materials. If you’re browsing Amazon, you might come across books generated by AI. Though Amazon KDP requires authors to disclose AI use in text or image creation, this is a detail that often doesn’t reach the consumer.

For those with their own websites, you can also protect your content by including a text file that prohibits the harvesting of data. This is a proactive step to ensure your work is not misappropriated by AI.

AI is making headlines and evolving at an incredible pace, isn't it? The rapid changes are both exciting and challenging as we all navigate what this means for our world. If you're as intrigued as I am about how AI is transforming various aspects of our lives, I’ve curated a selection of books for you. These resources will provide a detailed look at how AI is influencing everything from publishing to everyday experiences. 

1. Quick Start Guide to Large Language Models: Strategies and Best Practices for Using ChatGPT and other LLMs / Ozdemir, Sinan

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years. Models like BERT, T5, and ChatGPT have demonstrated unprecedented performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, from text classification to machine translation. Despite their impressive performance, the use of LLMs remains challenging for many practitioners. The sheer size of these models, combined with the lack of understanding of their inner workings, has made it difficult for practitioners to effectively use and optimize these models for their specific needs. This book is a practical guide to the use of LLMs in NLP...

2. Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write / Tenen, Dennis

Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology…

3. Time Is Now: A Journey into Demystifying AI / Verma, Raj, (CEO)

Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, takes readers on an insightful journey to not only demystify emerging tech like AI but to demystify how today’s leader must make decisions. Through engaging storytelling and relevant examples, Verma shares the lessons from his personal and professional life to glean timeless and universal lessons.

 

 


4. Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI / Murgia, Madhumita

A riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making. On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience-unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community…

5. The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI / Kurzweil, Ray

This successor volume to The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion the human race in the decades to come. In this entirely new book, Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity-assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential…

6. The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now / Schellmann, Hilke

Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor, and journalism professor at NYU. In The Algorithm, she investigates the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world of work. AI is now being used to decide who has access to an education, who gets hired, who gets fired, and who receives a promotion. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real-world tests, Schellmann discovers that many of the algorithms making high-stakes decisions are biased, racist, and do more harm than good. Algorithms are on the brink of dominating our lives and threaten our human future-if we don't fight back.

7. Simply AI: Facts Made Fast / Quigley, Claire

Covering a broad range of fields within AI - from computing and mathematics to politics and philosophy - entries demystify what artificial intelligence is and how it works, how it has dramatically changed how we live, and how it might evolve in the future.  Everyone is talking about AI, but this book helps to explain each individual aspect of AI more clearly than ever before.

8. AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health / Ferres, Juan M. Lavista

In AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health, a team of veteran Microsoft AI researchers delivers an insightful and fascinating discussion of how one of the world's most recognizable software companies is tacking intractable social problems with the power of artificial intelligence (AI). In the book, you'll learn about how climate change, illness and disease, and challenges to fundamental human rights are all being fought using replicable methods and reusable AI code.

9. Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future / Kahn, Jeremy (Jeremy A.)

A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predictions of AI's impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think…

10. Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World / Metzl, Jamie Frederic

In Superconvergence, leading futurist Jamie Metzl explores how genome sequencing, gene editing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are not only changing our lives, but catalyzing each other in radical and accelerating ways. These technologies have the potential to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, and store essential information for millions of years, but can also-if we are not careful-do immeasurable harm.

 

- Caitlin, Lawrence Branch