David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

New Article about Using AI for your Library’s Web Presence, Marketing, and Social Media

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I have a new article up at Computers in Libraries magazine, titled Using AI to Supercharge Your Library’s Web Presence, marketing, and Social Media.

Here’s the intro paragraph: “Generative AI (gen AI) made a huge splash on Nov. 30, 2022, when OpenAI released the first publicly accessible version of ChatGPT. Since then, gen AI has been quickly integrated into the tools we use and the work we do. This article explores how AI is being used to help libraries with social media content, our web presence, and even marketing.”

In the article, I cover:

  • General Concepts
  • Web Design and Management
  • Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Things to remember with AI

Each section covers AI tools that can help create or manage content, or some general ideas and philosophies when using AI.

Hope you enjoy the article – please go read it!

AI Art Project at the Library

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My library has an art gallery … and earlier this year, they experimented with generative AI! Read the article on my library’s website for more info.

The basics: library staff teamed up with Topeka Magazine, and played around with AI: They uploaded images of paintings into AI software and asked for a description of the image; then they used those descriptions to have Dall-E2 and Midjourney create AI-based art.

The results? They’re currently on display at the library. Fun project!

Here’s a link to Topeka Magazine, so you can read the article and find out a little more about the process and the results.

How is your library experimenting with generative AI tools?

AI Poetry Project – Creative Writing using ChatGPT

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Robot reading by Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

A few months ago, I was part of an AI poetry project, which culminated in an article in Topeka Magazine – It’s Not a (Beep! Beep!) Poet (and it doesn’t know it).

The project team included me, a professor, the current poet laureate of Kansas, and a local writer. My part was fun! My job for the project was to use ChatGPT and generate some AI-written poetry.

You’d think that would be easy, right? Just prompt ChatGPT to “write some poetry” (which it can do). But we were a bit more specific than that. We wanted six poems, which included a sonnet, a sestina, and some Kansas prairie focused poems. Some of these poems would be based on sample poetry that I inserted into ChatGPT as examples to mimic.

This was a bit more challenging that you’d think! ChatGPT seems to like structure quite a bit. It had (mostly) no problem with the sonnet or the sestina poems; both of those have a very specific structure to them.

ChatGPT was also good at knowing that you wanted to write something about Kansas, and pulling out the things you’d normally think of about Kansas. It could find “Kansas-y things” pretty easily.

The difficulty came from finalizing the poems. ChatGPT had trouble creating a specific number of lines for a poem. For example, if I asked for 30 lines of verse … I’d get 20. Or 50. Then I’d prompt ChatGPT to cut that down to 30 lines, and it would cut too many (or not enough). I finally had to resort to asking it to “supply 10 more lines of poetry” and things like that.

We also wanted some contemporary non-rhyming verse on some of the poems. That was hard – ChatGPT is positive that poems should rhyme, and kept providing rhyming lines of text, no matter how many times I asked it to not rhyme.

But I was able to provide some poems for the group to examine. Were these great poems? Nope. Would they get a passing grade in a high school creative writing class? Probably so.

Will AI creative writing improve? I’d guess so – let’s give it five or so years, and see where it is then. In the meantime, please read the article. Even better – experiment with more creative AI projects on your own, and see what happens!

Librarians as AI Prompt Engineers

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AI-generated image of a librarian!

I heard about an interesting new job while at Computers in Libraries 2023 (great conference, by the way!) – an AI prompt engineer.

What’s a prompt engineer? Here’s a description (from Computer Hope):

The idea of a “prompt engineer” came in response to AI text and image generators, which people noticed would produce higher-quality content when users give specifically-phrased prompts, as opposed to just asking naturally. The title describes people who are supposedly skilled at selecting the right phrasing so that AI tools generate the most accurate and relevant responses.

As the speaker talked about prompt engineers, and then moved on, I started thinking – hey, isn’t that sorta what librarians do? Sometimes, we just help find the answer … but often, our role is to help our customers ask a better question. Heck, some of us even have whole pages on our websites devoted to how to ask better questions.

We are trained to broaden, narrow, and refine a customer’s question, so that they can hone in on the answer they were looking for. To me … that kinda sounds like a prompt engineer.

And yes, I know – it’s not a complete picture. A “real” AI prompt engineer helps the large language model refine its output, so answers are accurate, sound conversational, and sounds like a human.

But the librarian-sounding parts, to me, seem like a pretty traditional librarian job. We help people figure out what they’re really looking for through refinement of their questions, by helping them narrow down a broad topic, or by adding important details to their search. Through the reference interview.

This is one reason I’m not too worried about our soon-to-be AI future when our search engines are also a type of answer engine. They’re only giving answers to the things people input into the system. In this new AI world, librarians will still be serving a very traditional role – helping to refine the question. And with generative AI tools, we might just be able to see the answers getting formed, as well.

Go forth and generate better questions!

Image: Generated from this prompt: “Cool-looking futuristic librarian answering a patron’s question” from Stable Diffusion Online