This week, 404 Media, which is publishing some really essential writing these days and is well worth your support, featured an excellent piece on the problem librarians are facing as their ebook collections start to fill up with AI slop. Emanuel Maiberg interviewed a lot of librarians for number of librarians for the piece, and their answers highlight the scope of a problem that I’m afraid is still in its early days.
The issue stems from how libraries manage and lend digital stuff — ebooks, audiobooks, movies and more. Libraries primarily contract with two services to for ebooks: OverDrive (which operates the popular app Libby) and Hoopla. There’s a difference in how these two companies operate:
….with OverDrive, librarians can pick and choose which books in OneDrive’s catalog they want to give their customers the option of borrowing. With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog.
The issue is that the work of identifying and flagging software generated slurry, especially in Hoopla, is falling on librarians’ already overworked shoulders. They have to comb through the collections to identify books like Fatty Liver Diet Cookbook: 2000 Days of Simple and Flavorful Recipes for a Revitalized Liver by Magda Tangy or ELON MUSK: Inspiring Quotes, Fun Facts, Fascinating Trivia and Surprising Insights of the Technoking by Bill Tarino.
Librarians have already been contending with this issue at Hoopla, a problem they dub “vendor slurry”:
Their catalog is flooded with low quality, unvetted digital materials numbering in the tens of thousands, which skew search results and surface misinformation over quality content… Top line searches return a plethora of irrelevant, seemingly AI-generated, and even pirated materials…
Given such a vast collection of books, it makes sense that it would take a lot of time and resources to correct, something that many libraries just don’t have. One anonymous librarian told 404:
“Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”
This is a fair response. I also increasingly think that in terms of AI’s attempts at art, this may be a fad we can wait out. This tech has not proved that it’s capable of making anything good or interesting: the writing is nonsense and the art looks terrible. The optimist in me wonders if the problem might solve itself: poorly generated slop pegged to SEO buzzwords will end up in the dustbin like so much of history’s bad writing.
What worries me is the scale of bad actors’ new tech-fueled abilities to flood the world with this garbage, which will only bloat and overwhelm already strained systems. Library shelves will never exclusively be filled with AI, but what if the firehouse is so overwhelming that it affects the ability of libraries to function properly? Not to mention the reputational damage to the institution if borrowers can no longer trust a library’s collection, or a librarian’s ability to connect them with information or entertainment that they want.
Luca Bartlomiejczyk, a librarian in Connecticut, told 404:
“If a patron, for example, wants to take out a copy of The Women by Kristin Hannah and what they find is a summary of The Women by Kristin Hannah with the word ‘summary’ written in a really tiny font, or they just think that it’s the thing that they’re looking for, and they don’t look close enough then it’s costing us the money for them to take it out,” Bartlomiejczyk told me. “It’s costing them the time, and they’re disappointed.”
Librarian organizations have already demanded Hoopla and OverDrive take action on this, noting that some books they keep in their catalogues are so low-quality, even Amazon won’t sell them.
This is an issue of quality — no one wants a library filled with computer-churned crap — but it also risks spreading misinformation that can be deadly, like in the case of a mushroom foraging book that tells you it’s okay to eat poison. And what happens when the desire to remove some books from a library collection ends up accidentally reinforcing the demands of bad faith actors like the censorious Moms For Liberty? Librarians have been treading carefully in how they discuss this, so as to not inadvertently hand talking points to book banners. Contending with slop is putting librarians in a really tough position, at a time when their work is under increasingly vociferous attack.
What really makes me mad about this and so many of the issues downstream of AI’s injection into everything, is that no one asked for this pile of AI ebooks. No one from Silicon Valley consulted us. But this is just another maddening example of tech’s gross and overconfident chauvinism, their oligarchic desire to impose their will, and their assumption they know what’s best and they alone have the right to envision and enact the future. It’s the same overbearing logic that empowers Elon and his phalanx of deranged, dictator interns — dicterns, let’s say — to start ripping the copper wire from the federal government.
What is big enough to stop tech, when our elected officials are autocrats, their enablers, or cowering in the corner? Get organized, and watch out for each other — we’re the only ones that can save ourselves.
