INTERVIEW ‘‘
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
The more you understand AI, the more sceptical you become because it’s obvious that so much of the discussion about AI is marketing talk. – Gordon Johnstone
Perpetually intensifying AI bot attack
Our metaphors fail to describe how AI works or what damage it does. But Gordon Johnstone, a speaker at the Green Libraries Conference says aggressive marketing and zero transparency are the immediate problems.
www.cilip.org.uk/ greenlibrariesconference
SCOTLAND’s AI strategy was published back in 2021 to put Scotland at the forefront of trustworthy, ethical, and inclusive artificial intelligence. The goal was also to make Scot- land a more prosperous, greener and more outward looking country.
“Obviously the world has changed a lot since 2021” says Gordon Johnstone, Communications and events manager at the Scottish AI Alliance – the delivery body for Scotland’s AI strategy. “Chat GPT was released by Open AI in 2022 which didn’t change the strategy - because the strategy is tool agnostic - but it changed our approach. It’s increasingly important for people to understand the role AI plays in their day to day lives and how it impacts them.” Work done by the Scottish AI Alliance includes the development of the course Living with AI, a non-technical beginner’s course introducing you to the social and ethical elements of AI and how it impacts you day-to-day. (
https://livingwithai.me) Another tool is the Scottish AI playbook created to help businesses. “We recently refreshed it,” Gordon says, “and it may be of interest to your members – like the AI jargon Buster, which goes through all the common terms that you’re going to encounter when you’re dealing with AI.”.
Bot attack
Back in March CILIP members and suppliers noticed such a surge in AI bots in their library management systems – one report putting the ratio of legitimate queries to AI bots at 19 : 75,000 in their LMS (https://
36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
openfifth.co.uk/fighting-the-ai-bots/ ) – that they thought libraries were being specifically targeted. It has led to systems ‘running hot’, using more power, and if it persists could require more and bigger servers. This, alongside the over-abundance of publisher AI search tools, copyright and transparency concerns, ethics and the environmental concerns – and many other day-to-day challenges posed by AI, leaves some wondering when the positives of AI will out- weigh the negatives.
“AI could have an amazing positive impact on the world, but that’s not inevitable,” Gordon says, “An AI future is unavoidable, but a positive AI future is not inevitable.”
He said: “The more you understand AI, the more sceptical you become because it’s obvious that so much of the discussion about AI is marketing talk. It’s hype.” And then, under the hype there are huge risks and disruptions – from the death of a free pub- lic internet to the eroding nation states. However, “AI hasn’t really invented any new problems, it’s exasperating and speeding up exist- ing ones. Bots crawling websites for content and information has been an issue since the dawn of the internet but now it’s happening on an unfathomable scale. And every time you find a specific solution, some clever person finds a way around it. But it’s a problem that every industry is facing right now.”
Losing ground
He doubts that traditional power structures will fix this. “In Scotland are we really influencing the
Autumn 2025
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