warrant

R. David Lankes has written here and posted a preprint, submitted to the Journal of Documentation, arguing that generative AI is causing an “Information Shock”: a disruption so deep that it dissolves the document — the field’s organizing unit — and demands a new information science. It is the best account we have of what generative AI does to the documentary foundations of information science, and I agree with nearly all of it. The distinction between AI that produces document-like objects and AI that co-authors exchanges is the sharpest framing of the problem in our literature. The argument that AI literacy carries document-evaluation over intact and aims it at something that is not a document is correct and overdue. What follows is not a rebuttal but an extension — because the most important sentence in his argument is nearly its last, and it stops one step short of a tradition built for exactly this moment.

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