My love of libraries was born between two cities and two generations. In Saginaw, Michigan, my grandmother was the librarian at Houghton Middle School. I spent endless days with her, nestled between the stacks, flipping through weathered books and searching for interesting books like buried treasure. Her library was my sanctuary, a place where the noise of the world gave way to stories that whispered courage, mystery, and possibility. I didn’t know it then, but I was being raised not only by my family, but also by shelves of words curated by a woman who believed deeply in the power of knowledge.

In Lansing, my mother made sure that spark didn’t fade. Every week, she took me to a branch of the Lansing Public Library, rain or shine. Those visits became a sacred rhythm. I fell in love with Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, George Orwell, and so many others. My imagination ran wild, my sense of storytelling sharpened, and my empathy deepened. We read so many books that the late fees piled up higher than our gas bill. I joke that our fines alone could’ve funded a college scholarship. But those books were my education long before I ever stepped foot in a university classroom.

Now, decades later, the sanctuary I found in those libraries feels even more precious, and even more endangered. As AI begins to mediate how we access knowledge, as algorithms shape what we see and what we don’t, and as centralized platforms tighten their grip on our information pathways, libraries may be the last remaining spaces where the pursuit of truth is not commercialized, compromised, or coded.

AI doesn’t just automate information. It distorts it. Large language models are trained on data scraped from the internet, data that reflects existing biases, dominant ideologies, and market priorities. What is most linked is treated as most credible. What is most recent is often favored over what is historically grounded. What is loud becomes what is true. As AI-generated textbooks, news articles, and even college essays flood the digital space, the danger is not just that we’re consuming misinformation. It’s that we’re accepting consensus without question. We’re mistaking prediction for knowledge.

We’re already seeing the fallout. When Elon Musk took over Twitter—now X—he dismantled key safeguards against hate speech and disinformation. Chaos followed. Trolls took over timelines. Verified lies spread. Hate groups found new reach. According to NPR, Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, spiraled after an update encouraged it to make “politically incorrect” claims. It stopped responding altogether at one point. xAI scrambled to relaunch. This isn’t Grok’s first controversy—it previously promoted Holocaust denial and white genocide conspiracies. Experts aren’t surprised. Removing ethical guardrails from AI trained on the internet’s worst content was bound to backfire. This chaos isn’t accidental—it’s engineered.

This isn’t just anecdotal. It’s a case study in how power, money, and digital tools can conspire to launder hate through the guise of open dialogue. Musk’s actions didn’t defend democracy. They degraded it. They made it easier for fascism to brand itself as edgy content, and harder for truth to be heard without distortion. It is precisely this moment, when the gatekeepers of knowledge prioritize clicks over consequences, that libraries become revolutionary again.

That’s why libraries matter more than ever. Libraries collect knowledge slowly and intentionally. They are curated by professionals who think critically, not profitably. Libraries should protect the obscure, the dissenting, the local, and the banned. They house books that haven’t been digitized, stories that haven’t been scraped by bots, and voices that algorithms would otherwise drown out. In a world that values speed and scale, libraries preserve nuance, memory, and resistance.

In the age of AI, centralized information becomes a tool of control. A handful of tech companies determine what’s visible and what’s buried. Government agencies, corporations, and lobbyists demand and shape narratives, flag keywords, and suppress dissent. The manipulation isn’t theoretical, it’s already here. We saw it when Facebook downranked news coverage of Gaza. We saw it when conservative operatives pressured Amazon to remove certain history books from Kindle. And now we see it in real time with X promoting extremism and silencing dissenting journalists. AI doesn’t break this system. It accelerates it.

But libraries answer to the people, not shareholders. They are public institutions, grounded in democratic ideals and committed to intellectual freedom. Libraries don’t sell your data. They don’t push you toward confirmation bias. They don’t serve you a curated feed of what they think you’ll like. They offer you choices. They offer you contradiction. They offer you the dignity of discovery.

Libraries are also spaces of radical accessibility. They provide free access to knowledge in a world where everything else comes with a subscription. They offer uncensored internet, job search support, youth programs, and community dialogue. They are often the only safe and warm spaces for unhoused individuals, the only place where elders can access healthcare information, the only venue where young people can explore identity without judgment or surveillance. In short, they are infrastructure for justice.

And in this AI-saturated era, libraries are becoming frontline educators in digital literacy. They teach people how to fact-check, how to detect deepfakes, how to question sources. They run workshops on resisting disinformation and understanding how algorithms work. While chatbots and platforms feed us ready-made answers, libraries still equip us to ask better questions.

The stories I consumed as a child, about resilience, about freedom, about imagination, about heroes and heroines, came to me not through a feed but through the hands of librarians who believed I deserved to know more than what the world was selling. They believed I had the right to read widely, think critically, and dream without permission. And today, librarians are still doing that. They’re defending banned books. They’re safeguarding marginalized histories. They’re fighting back against efforts to sanitize our past and politicize our future.

When I think about what AI can’t do, I think about my grandmother slipping me a book she thought I was ready for. I think about my mother patiently waiting as I read just one more chapter. I think about the smell of old pages, the creak of a wooden chair, the thrill of stumbling on a book I wasn’t looking for but desperately needed. No algorithm can replicate that. No chatbot can care about your freedom the way a librarian can.

AI will continue to evolve. It will help us in some ways, mislead us in others. But the antidote to its excesses is not more technology. It is more humanity. It is the preservation of spaces where truth is pursued deliberately, where knowledge is not flattened into sameness, and where people still believe that thinking for yourself is a radical act. That’s why we must invest in our libraries, not just financially, but spiritually. We must defend them against censorship, privatization, and neglect. We must teach our children to find joy in the quiet rebellion of reading. We must treat libraries not as nostalgic institutions but as strategic assets in the fight for truth.

Because in the age of AI, where information can be manipulated, monetized, and weaponized, libraries won’t just be important. They will be essential.

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