Clifford B. Anderson

Critical Legal AI Literacies: The Challenges of Synthetic Media

Clifford Anderson speaks on synthetic media as part of the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s Critical Legal AI Literacies series.

Yale Divinity Library Announces New Director

Atla shares the news that Clifford B. Anderson will become Director of the Yale Divinity School Library on May 1, 2024.

Interdisciplinary Team Develops Open-Access Computer Programming Course for High School Teachers

Clifford Anderson, Akos Ledeczi, and Brian Broll launch ‘Programming for a Networked World,’ a beginner-level Coursera MOOC introducing programming, distributed computing, and networking with NetsBlox.

Historians, Data Scientists Work to Preserve Endangered Middle Eastern Culture with NEH Grant

Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Heard Libraries announce a $350,000 NEH grant to make English translations of Syriac literature freely available online.

Director of Digital Research Appointed at CTI

The Center of Theological Inquiry announces the appointment of Clifford Anderson as its Director of Digital Research.

AI and the Future of Academic Libraries: Understanding the Current Situation

NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Webinar Series

In the third webinar of the series, “AI and the Future of Academic Libraries: Understanding the Current Situation,” ODI will continue the discussion on how artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every stage of the research process, from how students formulate questions to how scholars discover, evaluate, and synthesize information. As AI tools increasingly become the starting point for research, academic libraries, publishers, and technology providers are confronting fundamental questions about changing user behaviors, evolving expectations, and the future of scholarly discovery. What trends are emerging? How are researchers actually using AI? And what do these changes mean for libraries that have traditionally served as the gateway to scholarly information? Join panel experts Clifford Anderson (Yale University), Melissa Mallon (Vanderbilt University), and Russell Michalak (Goldey-Beacom College), and moderator, ODI Standing Committee member Andrew Adler (Western Kentucky University), to examine the current state of AI’s impact on higher education. Rather than focusing on predictions or solutions, panelists will explore what we are seeing today, discuss how AI is influencing academic libraries, and identify the opportunities and challenges that are already reshaping the academic information ecosystem.

Where Does Your Library Stand? A Hands-On AI Maturity Assessment Workshop

AI4LAM Fantastic Futures 2026: Trust in the Loop

This participatory workshop invites attendees to work through the AI Maturity Index for Academic Libraries together and to use their results as a catalyst for structured conversation about AI assessment, planning, prioritization, readiness, and governance gaps. The workshop’s value is not the tool itself; it’s the dialogue the tool generates among library staff with different roles, vantage points, and institutional contexts. Attendees leave with a complete maturity profile, a set of facilitation strategies they can bring back to their own institutions, and a richer sense of where their peers stand collectively. The AI Maturity Index for Academic Libraries assesses eight dimensions of library practice: Collections, Discovery, Facilities, Instruction, Metadata, Preservation, Research and Governance, across five maturity levels. The Index understands that AI maturity is not determined by the amount of AI technology a library uses. Instead, it measures how effectively AI serves its users’ needs. It was designed not only as a diagnostic tool but as a conversation starter, a structure that surfaces the assumptions, values, and trade-offs embedded in how libraries are responding to AI. This workshop operationalizes that design intent. Rather than presenting findings about the Index, we use the session time to run the tool and to model the facilitated institutional dialogue it can support.

The Ends of Technology (in Church)

Church & AI Conference / GoNeDiGiTal: Digital Theology to Date and Beyond

My goal in this paper is to explore the crafting of artificial agents that serve the ends of the church. I argue that an existing technique in AI safety training called ‘constitutional AI’ can be fruitfully adapted to create AI agents that promote the glory of God and the flourishing of human beings. After unpacking how constitutional AI works at a technical level—from reinforcement learning with human feedback to reinforcement learning from AI feedback—I trace the evolution of Anthropic’s constitution for Claude from 2023 to 2026 and propose that the church’s long history of confession and catechesis offers a better metaphor than constitutionalism: ‘catechetical AI.’ I then take up questions of free expression, sovereignty, and pluralism, contrasting the subsidiarity of Catholic social teaching in Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas with a Neo-Calvinist model of sphere sovereignty. Bending constitutional AI toward the ends of the church leads inevitably toward a greater pluralism than standard AI safety protocols anticipate—and that, I contend, is a good thing for the future of human–AI collaboration. I forecast the emergence of a new breed of theological engineer who catechizes models as ‘creedal machines’ to serve alongside congregants in the different spheres of human activity.

Slow Minds in Fast Times: Haruki Murakami's Fiction as Metacognitive Resistance to AI

International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 47: (Meta)Cognition

This paper (co-authored with Haerin Shin and Douglas Fisher) examines Haruki Murakami’s fiction as a sustained meditation on metacognitive practice that fundamentally opposes the accelerated cognition characteristic of generative artificial intelligence. Murakami rarely writes about computation and evinces distaste for technological advances, yet his fiction offers insight into a fundamental question facing us as AI rapidly advances: how to maintain human ways of knowing in an increasingly automated and algorithmically structured world. Drawing primarily on Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Dance Dance Dance, Kafka on the Shore, and Killing Commendatore, as well as the nonfiction of Underground, we argue that Murakami’s narrative architectures deliberately cultivate what Daniel Kahneman terms ‘System 2’ thinking—slow, deliberate, consciously effortful cognition. His liminal ‘other worlds’ enforce a durational consciousness that resists algorithmic compression, while his antagonists—hollow figures of algorithmic intelligence like Noboru Wataya and Menshiki—raise the question of whether strategic optimization and pattern recognition, however sophisticated, ever constitute genuine understanding without a moral center or experiential ground. Murakami’s novels model consciousness as essentially inefficient, necessarily embodied, and irreducibly temporal, demonstrating how literature itself might serve as a technology for preserving slow cognition against the tyranny of instantaneous processing.

Generating Stub Articles about Women in Religion: An Experiment in Retrieval Augmented Generation and Fine-Tuning LLMs

Artificial Intelligence and Religion Unit, Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion

This paper describes an experiment to generate stub articles about women religious leaders using a purpose-built artificial intelligence system as a means to address gender imbalances on Wikipedia. The Women in Religion User Group is an officially recognized Wikimedia Movement Affiliate that “seeks to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives of cis and transgender women scholars, activists, and practitioners in the world’s religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions.” (Women in Religion 2025) In the early stages of the project, we explored the use of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to improve the veracity of the stubs that the LLM generated. In the current phase of the project, we are fine-tuning an open-source large language model to improve its ability to create Wikipedia stubs. After reviewing these techniques, we discuss their effectiveness while also raising ethical questions about releasing our project in open source.

LLM-Assisted Markup of Entities in TEI: A Case Study

This paper presents a case study of marking up TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) documents using large language models. We detail our experiments using LLMs for named entity recognition and entity linkage in a corpus of TEI documents. The corpus consists of four journals co-edited by the Swiss-German theologian, Karl Barth (1886–1968). We aimed to enrich the TEI markup by adding XML elements to mark up entities and attributes to link to QIDs on Wikidata. We experimented with using both cloud-based frontier models and local open-source models to enrich a subset of 34 articles from the corpus. After analyzing the outcome using both human reviewers and automated analysis, we indicate where our methodology proved successful and where we encountered problems. We conclude that LLMs can perform named entity recognition and linking in TEI documents, but that the combined financial and labor cost of scaling this procedure to the full corpus would be relatively high without optimizing our current pipeline.

AI as Superscholar: Authorship at the Threshold of the Unsayable

Through a perspectival inversion, the authors explore what artificial intelligence—reconceived as a ‘superscholar’ operating as a scholarly collective unconscious—reveals about limitations in human authorship. AI exposes three interconnected crises: of credit, of verification, of comprehensive knowledge—each compounded by the responsibility gap endemic to learning automata. The article addresses implications for collection development, cataloging, and information literacy, proposing the goal of ’epistemic reparation,’ with AI surfacing marginalized contributions occluded by citational regimes.

Bits and Bias: The Case of Women in Religion

This chapter examines how gender bias becomes encoded in digital knowledge infrastructures, taking the representation of women in religion as a case study.

Kuyper and Princeton

This chapter examines Abraham Kuyper’s relationship with Princeton, from his Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1898 to Princeton’s later emergence as a center for Kuyper scholarship, tracing the reception of neo-Calvinism in American theological circles.

Artificial Intelligence for Academic Libraries

A comprehensive guide to artificial intelligence for academic library professionals, covering theory, practice, and ethical considerations for integrating AI tools and services into library operations and scholarly support.