Much of what I have read on AI or want to read I learn about from specific people and blogs that I’ve learned to trust. I thought I’d give them a shout out here.
The Library Society of the World, a loose cohort of libraryland folks, has been together online since 2007. I’ve learned so much from them over the years; they have been absolutely essential to me since day one. You can join us in the LSW at Mokum.
As an inveterate reader of blogs, I’d like to share the ones that have consistently fed me ideas and reading recommendations on the subject of AI:
- 404 Media
- Aaron Tay’s Musings about Librarianship
- Ars Technica
- The End(s) of Argument (Mike Caulfield trying out AI tools for evaluating claims in online sources)
- Futurism
- Generating Fail
- inkdroid (Ed Summers; especially his Weekly Bookmarks posts)
- Librarian of Things (Mita Williams)
- Marcus on AI (Gary Marcus)
- Second Breakfast (Audrey Watters’s posts are so essential that I pay to subscribe to them)
Since I agreed in September to teach the course again, I’ve been playing catch up with all the books that have come out since I last taught and trying to go back to ones I didn’t know about when I first taught the class. Here are the ones I’ve read this fall:
- Bender, Emily M., and Alex Hanna. The AI Con : How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. First edition, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2025.
- Franklin, Ursula M. The Real World of Technology. Revised edition, Anansi, 1999.. First learned about this book a long time ago from Ed Summers but didn’t read it until this year. While she doesn’t specifically cover AI, this work has deepened my understanding of the social aspects of technological change.
- McQuillan, Dan. Resisting AI : An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol University Press, 2022.
- Narayanan, Arvind, and Sayash Kapoor. AI Snake Oil : What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. Princeton University Press, 2024.
- Susskind, Richard. How to Think About AI : A Guide for the Perplexed. Oxford University Press, 2025.
- Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. University of Chicago Press, 1986. Also not on the subject of AI but rather a useful book to deepen my understanding of socio-technical systems. Includes the often anthologized and cited chapter, “Do Artifacts Have Politics.”
I’m currently half way through this book and am appreciating the author’s expertise as a linguist for her analysis of the impact of generative AI:
- Baron, Naomi S. Who Wrote This? : How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing. Stanford University Press, 2023.
I’ll try to read a few more by the start of my class next January:
- Warner, John. More than Words : How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. First edition, Basic Books, 2025. I’ve been reading his pieces on college writing instruction in Inside Higher Ed for years and think this would be a good book to follow Naomi Baron’s.
- Hao, Karen. Empire of AI Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Penguin Press, 2025.
I’m also trying to read more about socio-technical analysis, particularly as it relates to ICTs, and have been focusing my efforts on journal articles and book chapters. I’ll see if I have enough for a roundup of sources in a future blog post.