Kailyn Slater wins the 2025 Annual Library Juice Paper Contest

Library Juice Press is excited to announce the winner of the 2025 Annual Library Juice Paper Contest. Kailyn Slater’s paper, titled, “Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library,” published in the Library Trends, was determined by the award jury to be the most excellent paper at meeting the criteria for the award. The award jury consisted of three information professionals. The jury wrote,

At a moment where cultural heritage workers from technical services to reference and instruction are being pressured to embrace and utilize more and more so-called “AI” (e.g., GANs, LLMs, etc.) in their work, and vendors are forcing AI features into library software and onto databases, Kailyn “Kay” Slater’s clearly-argued “Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library” demonstrates how generative AI is contrary to the library profession’s standards, goals, and ethics. The committee commends Slater’s deeply researched essay for the way it synthesizes literature within and beyond library and information science and the resultant racist, sexist and anti-democratic consequences of its use. Slater challenges the notion of “AI literacy,” and shows that cultural heritage institutions should not be championing these “destructive technologies,” but rather that librarians and the library profession should be against generative AI, not supporting it, on their own terms. As Slater writes, “we should not uncritically accept its popularity at face value… an active refusal of generative AI in our work is necessary.”

Kailyn “Kay” Slater is a public library worker living in Chicago.

All papers were carefully read and judged using the following criteria:

• Clarity of writing
• Originality of thought
• Sincerity of effort at reaching something true
• Soundness of argumentation (where applicable)
• Relevance to our time and situation

The Library Juice Paper Contest winner receives an award of $1,000. The intention of this contest is to encourage and reward good work in the field of library and information studies, humanistically understood, through a monetary award and public recognition. Papers submitted may be pending publication, or published (formally or informally) in the year of the award. Any type of paper may be entered as long as it is not a report of an empirical study. Examples of accepted forms would be literature review essays, analytical essays, historical research, and personal essays. The work may include some informal primary research, but may not essentially be the report of an empirical study.

Library Juice Press is an imprint of Litwin Books, LLC specializing in theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective, for an audience of professional librarians and students of library science.