Digital Librarian, Internet Archive, Open Library. https://brewster.kahle.org https://archive.org https://openlibrary.org
![Can we talk about some of the wider challenges to creativity? We’re living in a world where AI is scraping writers’ creations and the creations of other artists. Do you share the concerns of creators that safeguards are either insufficient or not present?
I absolutely understand that. There’s a current debate in Parliament around legislation on exactly that. 9 We have a proud tradition of intellectual property laws. Alongside that, this explosive technological development age means that we have an extraordinary opportunity of computational power to analyze, to understand, to discover. What I do think is these two should not be set up in opposition.
footnote: 9 Elton John and Dua Lipa are among those urging the UK government to rethink plans to allow tech companies to use copyrighted material to train their AI models.
But they are in opposition, aren’t they? I looked online and discovered that both of my books have been scraped by AI. I didn’t agree to that.
Every country in the world is grappling with this; no country has yet fully cracked managing this boundary. But certainly as groups of libraries, we can both value creative content and put in best-practice ways of how you can get the best of AI in a bounded, ethical way.
Let me give you an example around our historic collections. We have 170 million items in 200 languages — a huge imprint of the world’s authentically created, human-created content. We’ve done a project through all our texts in older Javanese languages to use [the] mass computational power of AI to do machine discovery of what those texts say, and machine-supported curation of how to flag and catalog that. But that’s very different from AI scraping of your books, which as an author I would be really distressed about.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6zcjb6gz4dg3mvjlxhzdlbaa/bafkreic5iuraiopexowmqozk5gd73simtrx23iyig52f5yx7x42nf7mzk4)
Digital Librarian, Internet Archive, Open Library. https://brewster.kahle.org https://archive.org https://openlibrary.org