Thoughts from democracy in the dark a discussion on the impact of information control, AI and censorship

By Louise Warren

ALIA celebrated Library and Information Week from July 29th – August 2nd. This year, the ALIA team organised several online webinar chats on the 2024 theme Roots of Democracy.

On August 2nd, I attended the ALIA Library Information Week Zoom Webinar Democracy in the Dark.  

Webinar speakers included

• Dr. Amanda Lawrence (Wikimedia),
• Janet Catteral (Open Access Australasia)
• Trish Hepworth (ALIA Deputy CEO)
• Fiona Parsons (Analysis and Policy Observatory).

I attended the Library Information Week Webinars to maintain active knowledge in Libraries and gain insights from speakers on the introduction of large language models back in October, which had created a flurry of discussion about what it could be.

Speakers came from the library industry and had in-depth knowledge of the issues surrounding access to information, highlighting issues that could arise with access to information from censorship, paywalls and the introduction of AI.

Issues with access to information included the lack of diversity needed in a collection and the lack of stories from Indigenous women and children.

Another aspect shared with many speakers was encouraging grassroots organisations to share information over the large monopolies in the publishing industry.

I had been aware of the open access movement through my introduction to the research unit. One reason I knew open access was so important was to allow everyone access to resources so they could learn from it and improve on information. It was good to hear perspectives from Open Access Australia and Analysis and Policy Observatory, who spoke about access to published material in Australia.  They both had equal aims but differed in terms of what they collected. I learnt from Fiona from Analysis and Policy Observatory that their collection was a mass of grey literature, and what was a challenge for those documents, which are vital for the notion of government, was that information was largely inaccessible to most people.

Janet from Open Access Australasia discussed that open access has been moving away from published scholarly work and focused on looking at non-traditional research to provide breadth of knowledge.

During the meeting, speakers discussed asking for a person’s age before engaging in websites could be a potential issue.

Janet mentioned the upcoming changes proposed by the UNESCO Digital Compact. In more detail, Dr Amanda Laurence explained that the digital compact is a unilateral way of looking at the elements of open access and will be a point of focus for many counties and generations.

The final topic was about AI and what might lay ahead for collections. Janet initially replied terrifyingly. They were aware that ChatGPT was often a cause of truth decay and dissemination of misinformation. Trish said it was okay to calmly and slowly engage with AI to learn how to use resources ethically.

References:

ALIA. (2024, August 2nd). Democracy in The Dark. . Zoom.

United Nations. (n.d.). Global Digital Compact.