As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems pull data from across the internet, library databases and our online presence, it generates a significant change in our relationship with knowledge. But what do we really know about this pervasive technology? Do our societies have robust guardrails in place to protect people and democracies, and have we reckoned with AI’s environmental impact?

Join award-winning Professor Kate Crawford, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the social and political implications of AI, as she explores how AI is reshaping our societies, ecosystems and power structures with host Natasha Mitchell in State Library Victoria's 2024 For Future Reference lecture.

Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Her book Atlas of AI won multiple awards and was named one of the best books of 2021 by New Scientist and The Financial Times. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Design of the Year Award in 2019 and is on show at MoMA from 2022-2024.

Their latest work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology. She was named on the TIME100 list as one of the most influential people in AI.

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On 18 March 2026, Kathy Reid delivered a lecture at State Library Victoria exploring Mozilla Common Voice, language bias in speech tech and Mozilla Data Collective’s approach to ethical data stewardship for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.

Kathy Reid works at the intersection of open source, emerging technologies and technical communities. She has held several technical leadership positions, including roles in web and apps development, video conferencing and digital signage. She was previously Digital Platforms Manager at Deakin University, Director of Developer Relations at Mycroft.AI, President of Linux Australia, and a voice open source specialist at Mozilla. In 2019, she was one of 16 people from across the world to be chosen to help shape a new branch of engineering at the Australian National University's 3A Institute, where she is now a PhD candidate researching voice data and ways to prevent and respond to bias.

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“Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s not going to go away. We can hate it, we can refuse it, we can have doubts. But it’s here – and maybe we can use it for our own purposes and our own workflows in our institutions.” Dr Ines Vodopivec is convinced that AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn’t a novelty bolted onto library systems; it’s already reshaping users’ expectations and our definitions of data, and the workflows that connect the two.

Ines began her career in a Franciscan monastery in Slovenia, cataloguing 16th Century manuscripts, and has since then moved between librarianship, restoration and digitisation. Today, she is a digital‑heritage leader and Secretary General of AI4LAM whose career spans deputy directorship at Slovenia’s National and University Library, roles with UNESCO’s Memory of the World and the Europeana Network Association board.

In early February 2026, on a whirlwind tour of GLAM institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, she stopped by State Library Victoria to deliver a presentation that explored practical case studies for AI implementation in libraries across Europe and the US, including the National Library of Norway, Standford University Libraries and Bibliothèque National de France.

Alongside the promise of AI, she weighs ethics, access and the realities of staff skills, arguing for AI literacy and cross‑sector collaboration so libraries can remain trusted, user‑centred infrastructures.

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