Category: AI
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How are information professionals in the UK using Generative AI?
A recent report from CILIP, the Library and Information Association in the UK, provides results from a small survey of 162 “information professionals” in the UK from late 2024. AI and the UK Library Profession: Survey Report 2025 runs 33 pages long, but much of that consists of selected open-text responses to the survey. I…
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New Survey Report Shows How Library Workers Use AI in Ontario
A new report shows how Ontario library professionals are using AI tools in their day-to-day work and their perspectives on these burgeoning technologies. See the press release and access the 8-page PDF at https://ocul.on.ca/ai-machine-learning-2025-survey-report Surely Ontario isn't unique? This is one of the first reports I recall seeing that includes at least a few specifics…
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Guardrails don’t fit with scholarship
This is a fascinating summary of a big problem with some AI-enhanced library products: The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search (Aaron Tay). The link to the ACRLog post is also worth a read: “We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question”. In a nutshell, it appears that Microsoft Azure's OpenAI content filter,…
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Keeping AI Closer to the Vest with Sovereignty and Privacy in Mind
Three news releases in quick succession made my antennae stand up, though they've actually been trickling out over the past month. In the order I saw them: Introducing Lumo, the AI where every conversation is confidential. A new privacy-focussed LLM Chatbot from Proton. I've only poked at it a bit, but it seems solid, aside…
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The monster behind the LLM
I just spent some time exploring the site at Systemic Misalignment: Exposing Key Failures of Surface-Level AI Alignment Methods, and it's a thought-provoking place. In the context of AI, "alignment is the process of encoding human values and goals into large language models to make them as helpful, safe, and reliable as possible.[1]" Researchers at…
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I’m no longer concerned about energy use and ChatGPT
Last week, I tripped across a couple of posts from MIT that I thought included the clearest explanations I’d seen of the cost and *reasons* for the cost of training and using Generative AI. Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact and The multifaceted challenge of powering AI I added those to my list of bookmarks on…
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Librarians and teachers amongst the heaviest users of AI – The 2025 AI Index Report
OK, that's a clickbait title, but only a little. They're actually amongst the heaviest users of Claude, according to Anthropic (PDF), via the 2025 AI Index Report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI. The report itself is a 456-page PDF, so do start with the key takeaways, but then either search for specific words of…
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The State of Generative AI Use in Canada 2025: Exploring Public Attitudes and Adoption Trends
This is a very current report, with questions being collected between Feb 19-March 1, 2025. From the Social Media Lab at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), The State of Generative AI Use in Canada 2025: Exploring Public Attitudes and Adoption Trends. 1,500 Canadians were asked questions about their use and knowledge of generative…
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Using ChatGPT to keep up on the news is like using a potato to commute to work.
The title for this post came from Stephen Downes as a comment to my Mastodon post last year on the first article in this series: ChatGPT’s search results for news are ‘unpredictable’ and frequently inaccurate. “Building on our previous research, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted tests on eight generative search tools with live…
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How to increase memory available to VOSviewer on Windows
I've been poking at VOSviewer while helping a student figure out whether it'll be helpful for a bibliographic analysis project, and I was stymied by running out of memory when attempting to work with a large dataset. The manual (PDF) unhelpfully addresses this issue with a whole section: But there is no VOSviewer.jar file to…