Thinking about the ethical care of information, knowledge, culture, and what we do for societies over a very long time.

Joshua Chalifour

The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to

 consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc.

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

A common way to model the relationships of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom is the DIKW pyramid. Starting with its base, each concept builds on top of the former. The gist is that we require data to form information † we use information to gain knowledge † and we use knowledge toward developing wisdom. This model is one doorway to understanding the relationship between these concepts.

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Our Pragmatic Ignorance

Open data is a well-defined concept but in the public sector, there is some difficult work ahead for its digital curation. Although the support and production of open data from governments around the world varies (with many not yet supporting it at all) there are clear movements to encourage and grow open government data initiatives.

Digital Curation Issues Involving Open Government Data

This is the third part in a series of three posts.

Part 1 — The TPM Environment and Copyright Change from C-11 Part 2 — Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

 Part 3 — Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal

Download the whole document (PDF). The Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) identifies five categories of appraisal criteria.

Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal

I’ve been reading the draft consultation version of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy (PDF). The strategy proposes strengthening content, ensuring its preservation, and maximizing its access and use. These are important for many reasons the report addresses regarding culture;

Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft

I’ve been thinking about something like an instance

 Community Pledge

becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don’t mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated what their administrative commitments to their community are.

Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?

As a librarian, I talk with other faculty and students about their academic work and the life-cycle of the research process. I’ve always stressed that open access is important for many reasons, including toward making research outputs available to people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to get them.

Talk about the Broad Value of Open Access

This morning, upon learning of the newly negotiated NAFTA or as it seems to be called now USMCA, I sent the following letter to ministers of the current Canadian government. I appreciate the very difficult and complex work involved in negotiating the new version of NAFTA with the USA and Mexico.

Letter to Ministers Regarding the New NAFTA / USMCA &amp; “Intellectual Property”

This is the second part in a series of three posts.

Part 1 — The TPM Environment and Copyright Change from C-11

 Part 2 — Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

Part 3 — Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal Download the whole document (PDF). Archives face inexorable problems with the duty to preserve massive quantities of information, stored on frail digital media.

Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

I’d been concerned with what I had once called digital cultural amnesia. Though in reflecting on the word “amnesia” I no longer think it’s the best way to express the problem. Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, writes about the phenomenon in

 The Observer

. She takes the personal analogue and raises it to a national level.

Ephemera and the National Memory

Recent copyright legislation prevents archives from legitimately fulfilling key requirements for the long term preservation and provision of access to digital fonds.

How Recent Copyright Legislation (C-11) and TPMs Prevent Digital Preservation

Communia published its

 Public Domain Manifesto

. The manifesto identifies the public domain concept with respect to historical development and more urgently, its relevance to culture today. I think it makes an important statement, in terms of offering a level, common understanding that could be used widely across society, government, and business.

First Take on the Public Domain Manifesto

Gautama Mehta’s recent article “Proposal to install spyware in university libraries to protect copyrights shocks academics” is an important read.

Publishers Proposing Surveillance Tech on Libraries

Sometimes we see headlines in the news about a book being challenged at a library. People from different perspectives might see the content of the book or other aspects of it as threatening or inappropriate. Understanding these challenges and forming responses is essential to our work as librarians in advocating and supporting intellectual freedom. Now, the work to track this information will receive more coordinated support.

Tracking the Challenges Made to Canadian Library Books

The processes and supports within an institution can, I’ve noticed, demand a bit of effort to change. When we speak of

 open scholarship

or

 open science

, many aspects tie-in or lead out from those concepts, which makes the whole prospect of institutional change quite complex.

Institutional Change toward Open Scholarship and Open Science

I first read an e-book a few years ago when I decided to see how War and Peace felt on my phone. Engrossing. And probably no less so than it is on paper. Now I like both paper books and e-books but the spread of e-books is about more than just enjoying them or not.

E-books: New Experiences and Problems with Access

Chroknowlogy

The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite
interesting. I've facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented
some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools
and I've been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep
coming back to and which I don't feel gets the attention that it merits,
is the potential to **consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc. as
tools to be used for examining human cultures, behaviours, and
society**.

Most conversations I've seen about the utility of these tools revolves
around the novelty of what they produce (text outputs, image outputs,
coding assistants, etc.) and the ramifications. That garners debate on
the ethics of how they work and how those outputs may be used,
legitimate or otherwise. It certainly deserves critical analysis. In
many ways though these systems are banal, they're essentially
instructions for identifying and repeating patterns.

What, to me, is incredible about them is not just that they're
identifying patterns in human behaviour (all the material that they're
trained on), but that once these patterns are identified, we now see
that it becomes possible to generate new content believably mimicking
the patterns. That seems enormous for better studying and understanding
*ourselves*.

Yesterday, when the Center for AI Safety posted its [Statement on AI
Risk](https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk), [I
felt](https://cosocial.ca/@owlyph/110459623979640299) the underlying
premises or motivation for the statement were concerning. The statement
(signed by many business leaders, academics, and others with significant
stakes or interests in AI) says:

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
> alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear
> war.

On the surface, this seems agreeable, however there's so much to unpack
in that statement. I'm not interested in attempting that now; I think AI
is murkier than it's presented there. I would like to refer to my
initial point. Human-created, AI is essentially mirroring us. The
statement's formulation is both disingenuous and abdicates
responsibility. The statement starts off in the wrong.

If AI systems produce results or get used in ways that create the real
possibility of exterminating human-kind, then we need to seriously
examine and change these patterns in human behaviour that enable that.
What is it about the hundreds of thousands of social media conversations
that were scraped to train the model, which repeats in such ways that it
is possible to predict a new utterance that humans accept as the way
we'd expect a human to talk? What is that in all the Wikipedia entries?
What is that in all the digitized magazine and newspaper advertisements?
Because who thought that human culture is so incredibly predictable that
non-living, non-thinking, non-feeling algorithms can give the appearance
of something indistinguishable from a human?

The fear expressed in the statement is not a fear of AI at all. It's a
fear of humans destroying ourselves. If the people developing AI treat
it as an object of otherness, promote it as such, and encourage
discourse of it as such--if we all adopt that discourse, we distance
ourselves from ourselves and cannot understand what we are doing. I hope
to see more serious research projects in the humanities and social
sciences, which focus on the *lens that AI is* and then *examine it for
understanding our cultures and behaviours*.
