Epistemic vigilance
- Planted:
I read the phrase epistemic vigilance in Jane Friedman’s piece, AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality. It’s a fancy but precise way to describe something I’ve been thinking about for a while: AI hallucinations and slop introduce a tax on our learning—before believing what we read, we must judge where that knowledge came from and whether it’s credible, accurate, true.
Jane’s usage:
...what’s needed isn’t more instruction but something closer to a wellness intervention: relief from constant epistemic vigilance.