A Whole New Information World

Abstract

This introductory article explores the interconnectedness of the articles in this issue through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI), bots, and other technologies. The articles presented in this issue strive to demonstrate how the library and information science (LIS) field uses AI to interrogate social conflicts, critically question our professional knowledge base, engage in localized community knowledge building, and create interactive maps to preserve cultural knowledge and decentralize Western metadata values in non-Western contexts. This introductory article is presented as a readerly and writerly response to those articles because, as an experiment, I have co-authored this piece using Google’s Bard, a recently released AI chatbot. Google’s Bard is a powerful tool that generates text, translates languages, writes creative content, and answers questions. In this editorial, I share my own experience using Bard to identify the implications of AI as a co-author of the text. I discuss its advantages (if any) and disadvantages, and I outline how AI could impact the future of the LIS field.