Artificial Intelligence in Academia: A Global Phenomenon With Regional Variations
Artificial Intelligence is transforming libraries worldwide but its impact isn’t uniform. In our most ambitious webinar yet, three distinguished librarians share insights from their libraries and colleagues across different regions.
Check out “Librarians Delivering More Than Expected: Fluid Library Management and How It Works”, our first DGB Asia webinar for librarians in 2025.
The second 2025 De Gruyter Brill Asia webinar for librarians took place on Thursday 23rd October. It was the most ambitious webinar we have organised so far, with speakers from three different continents. The speakers were Dr Xin Bi, the Chief office of Data and Director off the Centre for Knowledge and Information at X’ian Jiaotong-Liverpool University [XJTLU], China; Alexander Berg-Weiss, who leads the software development department at the University Library of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Munich, Germany; and Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of the University of Denver Libraries, USA.
The webinar started at noon, Chinese time; 6 am, Central European time (which was 5 am in the UK) and at 10 pm on the evening of 22nd October, Central Standard Time, USA. It was facilitated by Linda Bennett and Annika Bennett of Gold Leaf.
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Dr Xin Bi
Dr Xin Bi described the multiple ways in which Artificial Intelligence is used at XJTLU. His presentation was extremely well-balanced, and although he was enthusiastic about the many opportunities that AI offers – e.g., to enhance the learning experience of students by providing personalised support – he also described potential pitfalls.
“AI is for enhancing but not for replacing.”
Aside from the ethical challenges that AI presents, for example, he said it could also damage students’ ability to think and write for themselves. He quoted extensively from the Unesco guidelines on how to use AI responsibly and went on to explain the principled structure that XJTLU has developed to ensure that AI contributes to the university’s strategy in every area without compromising its integrity.
He continued by describing how AI applications are implemented with the same close attention to detail by the library, for learning and teaching, research and the library’s own operational needs. He also demonstrated how powerful AI can be by conducting two on-screen searches during the presentation. Drawing on all the measures he had presented, he showed diagrams of the AI literacy education framework model which the library at XJTLU has perfected. This is a dynamic application which continually evolves through literacy exchange camps, and AI reading and learning days. Some of the outputs of the latter activities include fun projects such as the development of AI creative works collections, but AI is mainly used for much more significant research projects.
Dr Xin Bi’s conclusion was that “AI is for enhancing but not for replacing”.
Alexander Berg-Weiss
Alexander Berg-Weiss explored one of the negative aspects of Artificial Intelligence – how it (possibly inadvertently) undermines one of the most-dear to librarians and hard-won tenets of scholarly publishing, the principle of Open Access. After briefly explaining why Open Access and Open Science are so important, he went on to ask why, when libraries embrace the OA principle wholeheartedly, users are sometimes unable to gain access to their open publications.
He said that this is because the library has come under DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks from bots which crawl content and shut out legitimate users by (in lay terms) using up the library’s capacity to admit them. The traffic caused by AI bots can be massive. In a recent survey undertaken by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories [COAR], almost 50% of the respondents said they had been subject to such attacks. In reality, Alexander said this figure is almost certainly higher, because libraries may not always be aware that this is happening, or attribute user failure to access to other causes.
“Most libraries don’t have the resources to invest in keeping AI bots out.”
He explained the technical reasons for why libraries are particularly hit by this malevolent activity. As well as being committed to letting users in, because of their support for OA, most libraries don’t have the resources to invest in keeping AI bots out. Non-technological solutions might be to withdraw metadata enhancement, which itself flies in the face of the OA principle, or to seek judicial redress, but this would be costly, time-consuming and possibly inconclusive.
Libraries are therefore most likely to take, or be forced to put up with, the “ostrich strategy”, i.e., to ignore that it is happening. But – turning his argument full circle – Alexander said that libraries should be open, because they support OA, but how open can they afford to be? And how do librarians – and, for that matter, publishers – decide who and what to block whilst still remaining open?
Michael Levine-Clark
Michael Levine-Clark began his presentation with some details from the Student Honor Code at the University of Denver. This states that “unless expressly permitted by the Faculty Member, Students must not use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create all or any portion of a Student’s academic work.” However, as he pointed out, it is virtually impossible not to use AI in its broadest sense: Spellchecker, online translation services and search engines are all AI applications. Therefore, it is important for everyone to understand exactly what is meant by “Artificial Intelligence” in the academic context and for universities to engage in the provision of good AI literacy skills.
“Thoughtful use of AI can provide extraordinary benefits for the management of library workflows.”
He went on to consider the ways in which these skills are needed and should be deployed by library workers. Key concerns to explore should be the environmental impact of AI; authors’ rights; and – as Xin Bi also mentioned – the possible loss of critical thinking skills resulting from over-dependence on AI. However, thoughtful use of AI can also provide extraordinary benefits for the management of library workflows; discovery services; and direction to both students and researchers on how to read and summarise the texts that they need. Some publishers and aggregators have developed proprietorial services to assist with the latter, though, from the librarian’s perspective, cost remains a concern.
Overall, Michael was cautiously positive about the impact of AI on academia.
Roundup
Towards the end of the Q & A session which followed the presentations, a librarian from Perth used the chat to say that they “felt privileged” to have been able to join the webinar and listen to these three stellar presentations. It was a sentiment echoed by everyone present. This blog post barely scratches the surface of the thought and detail that went into each of these presentations.
The webinar was one of 5 presented by De Gruyter Brill over the past three years, each one exploring different aspects of AI. Our December blog post will offer a digest of all these webinars and also provide further details about a survey that we have commissioned to explore more deeply how AI affects librarians globally; and also a panel session on AI which will take place at the APE Conference in January, chaired by Dominique de Roo, the Chief Strategy Officer at De Gruyter Brill.
To catch up with the whole event, please find the video recording here.
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[Title image by imaginima/iStock/Getty Images Plus]