Your Name and Title: Emilia Marcyk, Head, Reference and Discovery Services
Library, School, or Organization Name: Michigan State University
Co-Presenter Name(s): N/A
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Any librarian who engages with information literacy for adult populations.
Short Session Description (one line): This session will present a case study for teaching about bias in AI tools, as well as the difficulty of evaluating the information AI tools provide to searchers.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like): As the head of a reference team at a large academic library, I have watched the rise of AI with both interest and concern. When the undergraduate Peer Research Advisors that I supervise identified AI as the focus for their group training for the semester, I was eager to help them learn productive ways to engage with existing tools while learning their limitations. Through the course of working with these students, I was able to learn more from them about how they and their peers are using AI tools instead of traditional search engines like Google (or library databases), particularly when they need to look up a quick fact or piece of data. Then, in mid-October, I read David Gilbert's piece in Wired that detailed how major AI tools were surfacing debunked scientific racism in their search results and decided to use that article as a basis for our remaining training sessions. This presentation uses those training sessions as a case study for teaching about bias in AI tools, as well as the difficulty of evaluating the information AI tools provide to searchers. My hope is to provide a starting point for other librarians who wish to incorporate information about AI and bias into their own information literacy instruction or reference interactions.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: David Gilbert (Oct. 2024). "Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity Are Promoting Scientific Racism in Search Results."
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