The freaking gall to put these sessions back to back…
I’m at my library’s Staff Development Day, this is in the itinerary. I should speak up during it, but hopefully I won’t be the only one though.
I actually think that putting these back to back provides an interesting opportunity for immediate point-counterpoint
Did Denise start her presentation by saying “Please disregard everything Sylvia and Kate said”?
Hasn’t happened yet, but i hope so! The ai one is about to start in a couple minutes…
I have a deep-seated need for you to come back and tell us.
Very sadly, there was enough of a time gap between the two for them not to encounter each other. I was kind of hoping for a fist fight lol
But did she call out the previous prsenters?
I don’t think she even knew about them? Somebody should really tell her, probably
I kinda thought all librarians would be on the same page (against “ai”) but it’s overwhelmingly been, “this is our future.”
Really sad because we should focus on information instead of use. And all the info we have on this is that outside of some specialized uses, this stuff is classist hype that will ruin our planet.
The job of librarians is information management and retrieval.
You can hate AI all you want, but you’d be a fool to ignore the biggest advance in your field’s tools in the past 20 years.
edit: Everyone wants to downvote, nobody will tell me why I’m wrong.
They’re not ignoring it. They want to fight it. Because AI is not a better search algorithm, its surrendering structure and relationships to an unauditable black box process.
Rather than democratizing information management you are intermediating an untrustworthy, hallucinating, spaghetti pile of code between humans and our corpus of knowledge. That’s why.
Isn’t the right answer to learn mastery over these tools instead of surrendering or trying to hold back the tide?
The point is not the retrieval, but the understanding of the information structure. The same way that the point of math problems is not the answer, but understanding the process. There is no advancement in learning by having something sitting next to you spitting out answers.
There is no mastery. There is no version of this tech that allows it to work at the level we expect information retrieval to be. It will always hallucinate, it will always be more computationally expensive than what we had before, and it will always have been built upon stolen information and media. Morally and practically it is inexcusable.
You can learn how the enemy works without taking them out to dinner.
Surely you should learn their tactics?
I don’t see how sticking your head in the sand does anything. Luddites had legitimate grievances, but today 99% of weaving is automated.
This is a mischaracterization of the position. I am not sticking my head in the sand. I am questioning the value proposition of the technology. I use it for some things, and will not touch it for others.
You got it
Wouldn’t it be better to learn how to use a kitten blender instead of trying to hold back the tide of kitten blending?
What “staff development” is possible with technology that is developed to eliminate staff?
They don’t want to make librarians more effective, they want to grind them up into dogfood.
That is, frankly, incredible. I think someone with a sense of humour and a point to prove may have made this itinerary.
I think they meant exploitation and confabulation
Any suggestions for what I should say?
“Are you concerned about cognitive offloading, financing the tech supremacy and the AI bubble, destroying physical books, your jobs and libraries disappearing, the furthering of mistrust, AI-generated CSAM, putting knowledge being paywalls, the biases, propaganda and ads that will eventually permeate this technology in a capitalist world and the next talk at this event?”
Read this too late to ask all that, but I did make a few comments of the same sort. My coworker’s were unfortunately a lot less negative about it though… 😭
