The Wicked Problem of AI: Information Avoidance, Uncomfortable Knowledge, and ChatGPT in Scholarly Communication

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has had polarizing effects due to its content‐creation capabilities and the systems in which it is integrated; at the same time, GenAI has been undertheorized in information science. By grounding its conceptual inquiry in the literature and examining the scholarly communication ecosystem, this short paper considers the role of GenAI as a “wicked problem” for scholars and publishers in scholarly communication, affecting how information is produced, selected for publication, and consumed. The concept of uncomfortable knowledge is used to explore how GenAI may be accepted or rejected out of hand. Building on this, the human information behavior (HIB) principle of information avoidance further situates the problem by examining how scholars and publishers may resist or ignore information that conflicts with their existing worldviews. By formally intersecting these concepts to analyze GenAI in scholarly communication, this paper addresses an important conceptual lacuna in information science.