Libraries look to preserve truth and creativity as AI evolves

On March 31, Mount Vernon Library Director Isaac Huffman uploaded a video essay to YouTube titled, "You're not rejecting AI. You're Choosing Good Books."

In the video, Huffman discusses generative artificial intelligence and, in his opinion, its inability to replicate human emotion and creativity - two of the most important qualities of good fiction.

Huffman's concerns regarding AI-generated books led him to declare the Mount Vernon Library Commons an "AI-free oasis," meaning he and library staff will do their best to keep the library free of AI-generated books, he said.

Huffman said he knew the decision would upset some library users, but a majority of patrons he's spoken to support his decision.

He also knows that keeping the library free of AI-generated books won't be easy. The number of AI-generated books is huge and seems to be growing quickly.

The number of books written using generative AI has increased significantly in recent years. Though it's impossible to tell exactly how many were generated using AI, the number of self-published books increased about 39% from 2024 to 2025.

About 4.17 million books were published in 2025. Of these, about 3.5 million were self-published, according to Bowker, which provides resources to help authors publish, distribute and promote their books.

Not all self-published books are written with AI, but many suspect it's likely that a good chunk of them are.

In 2023, Amazon limited the number of books an author could publish to three a day after AI-generated books began to flood the market. There are authors who are publishing the three-book limit daily.

Because the bulk of AI-generated books are self-published, Huffman said this causes the library to be more reliant on traditionally published books than it would like.

But even books published traditionally are not guaranteed to be free of AI.

Huffman mentioned the book, "Shy Girl," which was published in the United Kingdom by Hachette Book Group in November.

Hachette Book Group discontinued the book in the U.K. shortly after its release and canceled its plans to publish the book in the United States after readers suspected that the author used AI to assist in the writing of the book.

There is no reliable tool to detect AI-generated books, and it's clear that AI-generated manuscripts can even slip by publishers, Huffman said.

As the library looks to add new books to its collection, staff will serve as the last line of defense. Staff will have to do thorough research to ensure that the books aren't AI generated, Huffman said.

For Huffman, the decision to keep the library free of AI-generated books is about keeping the library a reliable, trustworthy place for the community for years to come.

He said it's not his role to tell people what they can and can't read, but it's important to him that the library continues to carry exclusively high-quality books, and he doesn't believe AI is capable of that kind of quality.

"We should really be looking at that quality issue right now, because quality matters in curation, you know, and you're trying not to be like content police - I don't want to be like ‘a certain content is right,' - but I am trying to be quality police," Huffman said.

He said that he'd rather take a stance against AI now than allow AI-generated books in the library and need to course correct once the library's collection is already full of AI-generated content.

Every library makes its own choices regarding its collection, Huffman said, which is what makes each library unique. He hopes that in choosing to reject AI-generated books, the library will remain a high-quality resource for its users as AI-generated books become prevalent elsewhere.

"I think if you don't protect quality now, you're choosing a future where you'll be indistinguishable from everything else," Huffman said.

At Central Skagit Library, Library Director Dan Owens hasn't taken as firm a stance against AI as Huffman, but he does have concerns about AI-generated books, especially regarding AI's accuracy in nonfiction books.

Owens said that as the use of AI grows, he hopes publishers continue to have high standards when it comes to factual accuracy.

"I think one of libraries' big concerns with AI over the long term is that the standards of quality that are in book publishing are maintained," Owens said. "We would be very concerned about the weaknesses of AI being reflected in the books we purchase. We want to buy books that are factually correct, and have gone through that publishing process that guarantees some level of quality."

He said AI seems to get things wrong frequently when it comes to works of nonfiction.

Despite this, Owens isn't ready to write off AI completely. He said the technology is still young, and there's a chance it develops into a useful tool.

For now, the factual inaccuracies are keeping Owens from embracing AI-generated books.

He also said library users don't want AI-generated books.

"From every informal discussion I've had, (library patrons) want something created by a person and we want to be able to know with confidence that what we're purchasing from a book vendor was created by a person - or wasn't," Owens said.

If publishers begin to use AI tools, Owens said he would like them to be transparent when AI is used in the production of a book. He also said is should be clear to readers when they are checking out an AI-generated book.

But Owens has no plans for Central Skagit Library to carry AI-generated books.

"We certainly are not going to purchase any AI content, like fully generated AI content, in the near future. But libraries have a long history of working with new technology, and I think it's too soon to tell exactly how that's going to play out for libraries and public libraries, and right now, our biggest thing we're working on is awareness."

Public libraries aren't the only ones navigating the landscape of AI-generated content. University libraries, for example, have their own set of unique challenges.

At Western Washington University in Bellingham, Dean of Libraries Madeline Kelly said that Western Libraries is approaching AI-generated content and generative-AI tools with caution.

She said that Western Libraries hasn't taken a definitive stance on AI, but that Western Libraries acknowledges that AI is a "major technological force."

"We're still kind of in the wild west phases of things," Kelly said.

She said that Western Libraries serves students and faculty with varying attitudes toward AI depending on their area of study. This makes it difficult to know where to stand as a library.

For example, arts and humanities students may view AI as a threat to their careers, whereas many accounting students have embraced AI as a helpful tool, she said.

Factoring in professors' goals adds another level of complexity for the library, she said.

If Western Libraries makes AI tools available to students, it's important that those tools don't get in the way of the professor's goals and intended learning processes for students, Kelly said.

She said that reading a scholarly article and learning to extract information from it is a huge part of the college experience. She wants to be sure that an AI tool doesn't give a student a shortcut in that process.

"We want to be cognizant that some of these tools might be kind of circumventing that goal," Kelly said. "So we're just trying to navigate that landscape of making tools available to people as appropriate, but also recognizing where the tools maybe go too far and do something that is contrary to the teaching mission of the faculty at Western."

She said that it's a library's role to help people navigate information and new technologies. AI is just another step in that process.

"I think libraries, we primarily exist to help people navigate the landscape of information, and that used to mean books, and then it meant the internet, and now it means figuring out how generative AI fits into that picture," Kelly said.

"We do teach information literacy, we teach people how to navigate Google Scholar, we teach people how to navigate the open web, and so in some ways, generative AI is just kind of the next step in that."

She said that while not all Western Libraries staff are proponents of AI, there may be opportunities to implement AI tools into their workflow to increase efficiency, as long as it doesn't come at the cost of human interactions.

Kelly said that all libraries value human expression and engagement, and it's important to her that AI tools don't get in the way of that.

There's a fine line between making AI tools available, and allowing library users to become dependent on them, she said. But the tools do present an opportunity for libraries to help users navigate information.

"Our job is to understand the landscape of information, to understand how it works, to understand how to navigate it, and to really be kind of meta-experts in how that applies in a bunch of different fields," Kelly said. "So I think it's a great opportunity if we can just keep walking that line of expertise and open dialogue and respect. I'm sure public libraries have probably a whole different, complex set of challenges, but I think we're all just trying to engage with our constituents and make sure that we're kind of all in this together."

As AI-generated content and tools continue to evolve, it's unclear where the technology will go. But it is clear that libraries will continue to protect truth and human connection.

As Huffman said in his video essay, "We'll be fighting against powerful tools that are meant to trick and deceive. There will be gray areas to address and compromises to be made, and we'll inevitably lose at times. And yet we will continue to fight for genuine human authorship and the truth that it delivers."

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