Teaching AI as an Anti-AI Librarian

Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Eleanor Ball, Information Literacy & Liaison Librarian and Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2025-26 year here at ACRLog.

I’m about as anti-AI as they come. I’ve never used it, and I’m ethically opposed to it due to concerns including (but certainly not limited to) copyright infringement; environmental impact; and the erosion of reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. 

And yet, I’ve found myself teaching an AI course next semester. 

I was recently hired at the University of Northern Iowa as part of the library’s credit-teaching librarian team. I’ve always wanted to teach, so this position is a dream-come-true combination of my passions for librarianship and education. This semester, I’ve been learning the ropes through co-teaching a general education information literacy course, and next semester, I’m excited to have my own classroom for the first time. However, in our credit-teaching team meetings, it became very clear that the greatest need was an instructor for our one-credit elective about AI: LIB 1100 AI, Algorithms, and (Y)our Future.

Initially, I felt like I was at a crossroads. I wanted to prove myself as a teacher and be a team player, but . . . a course about AI? I’d never used generative AI in my work (and I was not about to start); even more importantly, I feel that higher education should be a place of special caution when it comes to AI, not a place of “moving fast and breaking things,” so to speak. In an educational context, AI risks such as hallucinations and copyright infringement are especially dangerous. However, I was determined to take on this challenge and try to make this course my own. 

I knew I didn’t want my class to be a lab where students experimented with how to prompt generative AI tools in the most efficient way. While some of my colleagues would argue that this is the most effective way we can prepare our students for the workforce in 2025, I disagree. I believe we need to prepare our students for the workforce by instilling reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. These skills enable them to critically evaluate the information given them by generative AI tools (and social media platforms, news companies, and so on) to come to their own conclusions. These skills prevent them from being entirely reliant on generative AI to do the messy thinking, trying, and dreaming work of being human. 

As I brainstormed how to teach LIB 1100, I returned to my core values as a librarian and a teacher. I knew that I would be on stable ground if I started from there. My most important value as a librarian and a teacher is curiosity; I want to stay curious about the world around me, and I want to encourage students’ curiosity and empower them with the skills to follow their questions and ideas. I also spoke with my colleague who is currently teaching this course. I gathered some reading recommendations to deepen my background knowledge of this topic, and I learned some intriguing—and saddening—information. She told me that from the first day we offered LIB 1100, many students shared that the reason they signed up for the class is because they were worried about AI replacing their jobs, and they wanted to learn more about how big this risk was and what they could do about it. 

From talking to students this semester, I’ve also learned that “pro” vs. “anti” AI is not two black-and-white boxes that everybody fits neatly into, but a spectrum with a lot of grey area in between. I was surprised and intrigued to hear perspectives like “I use Chat to outline my paper but not to write the text,” “I upload my homework to check my answers or get help if I’m stuck, but I try it myself first,” or “I ask Chat about some stuff, but it’s just easier to look up other things myself.” This might seem to contradict many students’ worries about AI replacing their jobs, but I don’t think it does. So far this semester, I’ve met many students who are interested in using AI for some tasks but still crave the agency and autonomy of being able to claim ownership over their work, build skills, and assess their growth independent of a generative AI tool.

From my reflections, readings, and conversations, I’ve begun to develop my approach to teaching LIB 1100 in the spring. There are so many headlines about AI that make us curious. How does generative AI even work? What is deep learning? Is there an AI bubble? What is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and why is everyone so worried about it? Regardless of whether my students would consider themselves “pro-AI,” “anti-AI,” or somewhere in between, it’s important to understand the technological, economic, political, and social issues swirling around AI—and that will be the goal of this course. 

Now that I’ve begun pulling together readings, sketching out the class structure, and brainstorming assignment ideas, I’m incredibly excited to teach this course. I realized that my initial “no way!” instinct towards anything with the word “AI” in it had almost closed off a highly valuable educational space for both my students and me to be bravely, honestly curious—which was certainly a humbling moment. 

I still believe that higher education and libraries should not serve as AI accelerants. Rather, we should serve our communities by operating as repositories of knowledge and forums for debate—and that’s what I hope to do in my classroom next spring.