Investigating the “Feeling Rules” of Generative AI and Imagining Alternative Futures

Investigating the “Feeling Rules” of Generative AI and Imagining Alternative Futures

In Brief
Since the public debut of ChatGPT in November 2022, the calls for librarians to adopt and promote generative AI (GenAI) technologies and to teach “AI literacy” have become part of everyday work life. For instruction librarians with reservations about encouraging widespread GenAI use, these calls have become harder to sidestep as GenAI technologies are rapidly integrated into search tools of all types, including those that libraries pay to access. In this article, I explore the dissonance between, on the one hand, instruction librarians’ pedagogical goals and professional values and, on the other, the capacities, limitations, and costs of GenAI tools. Examining discourse on GenAI and AI literacy, I pay particular attention to messages we hear about the appropriate ways to think and feel about GenAI. These “feeling rules” often stand in the way of honest and constructive dialogue and collective decision making. Ultimately, I consider work from within and outside librarianship that offers another view: that we can slow down, look honestly at GenAI capacities and harms, take seriously the choice some librarians may make to limit their GenAI use, and collectively explore the kinds of futures we want for our libraries, our students, fellow educators, and ourselves.
By
Andrea Baer
At the April 2025 Association of College & Research Libraries Conference, academic library workers gathered in person and online to explore the theme “Democratizing Knowledge + Access + Opportunity.” Before sessions about how to integrate generative AI (GenAI) tools into essential public services like teaching and research services, sociologist and professor of African American Studies Ruha Benjamin offered the opening keynote. Articulating the resonance of the conference theme for her, Benjamin reflected, “One way to understand the stakes of this conference, … why it’s so vital that we work in earnest to democratize knowledge, access, and opportunity at a moment when powerful forces are working overtime to monopolize, control, and ration these social goods, is that this is a battle over who gets to own the future, which is also a battle over who gets to think their own thoughts, who gets to speak and express themselves freely, and ultimately who gets to create” (Benjamin, 2025). Noting that technologies are never neutral but rather reflect “the values or lack thereof of their creators,” Benjamin drew a connection between current attacks on libraries and higher education and a category of technology that was prominent throughout the conference program: artificial intelligence. “[I]t should give us pause,” she asserted, “that some of the same people hyping AI as the solution to all of our problems are often the ones causing those problems to begin with.” Applause followed.
Though Benjamin did not name the prominence of AI across conference sessions, I was probably not the …