A new head librarian at the University of Rochester is preparing to take on a growing challenge — adapting to generative artificial intelligence.
Tim McGeary takes on the position of university librarian and dean of libraries on March 1. He is currently associate librarian for digital strategies and technology at Duke University, where he’s witnessed AI challenges firsthand.
“There is essentially an arms race among the generative AI companies to try to get as much data as possible for their models to be trained to be as thorough and as deep as possible,” McGeary said.
That race for information and metadata hit Duke servers in a big way last spring by "brute force," he said.
“Our servers went down as we were preparing for finals, because AI companies’ bots were just constantly hitting our servers," he said.
He added that it was clear by the activity that it wasn’t human “based on what they were trying to consume and how fast they were trying to consume it."
The University of Delaware reported similar swarms from AI bots over the past year that strained its system’s capacity.
“(The university’s digital repository) was dealing with an unforeseen consequence of its own success: By making (university) research freely available to anyone, it had actually made it less accessible to everyone,” Jamie Washington wrote for the campus online news source, UDaily.
That balance between open access and protecting students, researchers and publishers from potential harms from AI is a space of major disruption, McGeary said.
"If they're doing this to us, we have open systems, what are they possibly doing to those partners we have in the publishing space?" McGeary asked. "We've already seen some of the larger AI companies have to be in court because they have acquired content in ways that are not legal.”
In the past 25 years, he said he’s seen how university libraries have evolved with changing technology; they've had to reinvent how they serve research and scholarship. So in a way, this is another iteration of those challenges, he said.
“We went from (the) early 2000s where faculty were really nervous about anybody doing their research online, to accepting that an online journal is the same as a printed journal,” he said. “With AI, particularly, we're in that next shift of: ‘how do we move into this era, and think about it the same way, or similar ways?’”
While he’s apprehensive about AI, including its ability to “hallucinate” and manufacture misinformation that is interwoven with facts, he also sees an opportunity to use it as a tool.
And for librarians to continue to be a source of knowledge in a changing world.
