Librarians Are Being Asked To Find AI-Hallucinated Books (404media.co)
- Reference: 0179376878
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/19/203223/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/
A Library Freedom Project survey found patrons increasingly trust AI chatbots over human librarians and become defensive when told their AI-recommended titles are fictional. Kristan now routinely checks WorldCat's global catalog to verify titles exist. Collection development librarians are requesting digital vendors remove AI-generated books from platforms while academic libraries struggle against vendors implementing flawed LLM-based search tools and AI-generated summaries that undermine information literacy instruction.
[1] https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/
Not just defensive (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife works in a library. Some of these people become not just defensive, but outright hostile. Part of the problem is socioeconomic and education based. A lot (not all but a lot) of people using libraries on a daily basis don't have much formal education and have little experience with computers. Much of my wife's work is just helping people do very basic tasks, like showing someone how to open a Word document, or how to download or upload a file for a job application. So for probably some of these patrons, ChatGPT must seem like magic. The interface is simply typing what they want, and even highly misspelled or garbled requests will generate something like a coherent response from it, so they don't even need to know what any icon means. And if one is dealing with people who often literally don't understand the difference between a file stored on a computer and a file on the cloud (to use one common example) then even explaining the idea of an AI hallucination is going to be an uphill battle.
Re: (Score:3)
> My wife works in a library. Some of these people become not just defensive, but outright hostile.
I suspect part of it is also being told something they asked for is incorrect and taking it a being told they are wrong and thus taking it personally, even when though that is not the librarian's intent.
Re: (Score:3)
Part of it is learning to be diplomatic with ignorant people such as those you mention. Don't say: you're wrong, the book you are looking for doesn't exist. Say instead: sorry, the library computer can't find it rigght now, maybe it was misfiled, come back another day. You will seem helpful and mildly incompetent to them, and then they will go way.
Re:Not just defensive (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a much worse answer as it helps feed the algorithm. Kill the expectation of ever finding the fake book.
Re: Not just defensive (Score:2)
Every public library has a stack of surplus books they want to be rid of, hence the annual book sales.
So what they should do is get the author name and book title from the patron, print a cover with those words and some generic picture, and glue that to the cover of one of the surplus books. Give them that.
Make everyone happy.
Re: (Score:2)
So we have to treat a chunk of society like potentiality violent children, great.
Re: (Score:1)
Nobody should be required to come off as being incompetent because these people cannot think and then grow angry for being told they were hoodwinked by some AI.
Re: (Score:3)
I’ve had multiple people tell me ridiculous things they heard from a LLM and when shown that that is wrong fly off the handle, double and tripling down because the AI is “super intelligent”. The world is legitimately in danger of weaponized confidentiality incorrect idiots.
Re: Not just defensive (Score:3)
Wait, you mean the files are ... IN the computer?!
Russia must love AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Russia's favourite weapon is misinformation. They have a saying that if you want to conquer a nation instead of sending tanks you just plant a disagreement and let the nation collapse on its own.
They must really love what's happening in the world right now. AI is doing all the dirty work for them. Persistent disinformation.
"become defensive"... (Score:2)
So we now have idiots of the 2nd order: They believe the AI hallucinations and defend them as if they were their own hallucinations. Nice.
Easy answer for the librarians. (Score:2)
Set up a computer that you type anything into and it names a fake library some distance away. Tell them it's ChatGPT, and it says to go there.
Then if they return, "defensive", tell them they must have not searched correctly, because the chatbot says it's real.
Re: (Score:3)
Or, just lower your voice, and whisper to the person asking: "I should not tell you this, but that book has been black-listed by the government, so we are not allowed to speak of it anymore."
Re: (Score:2)
Another option: Setup a computer that actually does use some (locally hosted, reasonably cheap) LLM, but with a system prompt that instructs it to make up "chapter 1" of any book it is asked for based on the book title - but make it boring to read, then offer the user to generate the next chapter upon request.
This isn’t a problem (Score:2)
The librarian just needs to put the request into a LLM prompt and generate the book, problem solved!
Oh god, the world is screwed.
AI will make up programming classes and functions (Score:3)
When AI was just starting to become popular a co-worker asked me to review code they could not get to work. I took one look and quickly understood that core library functions being used did not exist and that is why the code failed. He had used AI and then did not even go to any trouble to look at the API to verify the code.
What comes next (Score:2)
> Libraries nationwide are fielding patron requests for books that don't exist after AI-generated summer reading lists appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year.
Step 1: Find out which fake titles received the most requests
Step 2: Have AI write books to go with the titles
Step 3: Profit?
Re: (Score:2)
Babies are the most notorious suckers.
New category (Score:2)
Libraries will now have 3 categories instead of 2: Non-fiction, fiction, and fictional.
Lie-brarians (Score:3)
It never ceases to amaze me how people will accept as correct whatever output a computer provides while disbelieving someone who is likely an expert in their field or at least has information available to validate or to attempt to correct the computer's output. I suspect AI's flattering way of providing answers makes people feel more connected to their 'friend' versus some random librarian and thus get defensive when told something doesn't exist.
Re: Lie-brarians (Score:3)
It's Lie-barian
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a general trend: People believe some random crap over expert statements.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup and the more you keep telling yourself that (alongside that the MSM lies), the more you're likely to believe whatever random crap someone on Youtube or TikTok tells you.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, absolutely. These days, I spend so much time checking the output from computers, it would normally have been quicker to do searches by hand. This is... not useful.
Newspaper fact checking (Score:2)
What level of fact-checking requirement should be put on the newspaper and publishers in general for what should be factual data, a list of books, the birth date of presidents, etc. and other things which are not opinions?