Careful vs Careless: Library Custodians and Artificial Readers

Large Language Models have, in a sense, created the ultimate (un)ideal readers for electronic libraries. By treating e-libraries as vast training datasets, algorithmic scraping has become both the fulfilment and the ruin of a core dream in public library culture: that access to books should be free and unlimited for all. AI systems read everything and nothing, at inhuman scale and speed — extracting patterns and selling what they pretend to know as consequence. What once symbolised a democratic promise now risks feeding extractive logics that empty reading of meaning.

So, why should we care — and if we do, how can we put that care into practice?

The ‘Careful VS Careless’ exhibition centres a new conversation between three custodians of radical public libraries, known as ‘shadow libraries’: Dušan Barok, founder of Monoskop, and Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, co-founders of Memory of the World. Organised around that conversation are a mixture of symbolic and tactical gestures that help people to think and act carefully in relation to the infrastructures of their public knowledge systems.