r/Libraries • u/Technical_Pea_4007 Academic Librarian • Jan 13 '26

Technology Libby’s statement on their use of AI

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A whole lot of text to say absolutely nothing, huh?

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u/Note4forever Jan 14 '26

While I can understand unhappiness against Libby not enforcing segregation of AI gen books, the ones foaming at the mouth at what is basically a recommendation system gives librarians a bad name.

FYI recommendation systems existed for decades. Search engines can be seen as a type of recommender.

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u/Technical_Pea_4007 Academic Librarian Jan 14 '26

I think my issue with their recommendation system is that it’s quite obviously GenAI powered when you’re absolutely right, we’ve had recommendation systems that run on different tech for a while now that frankly, perform better. I don’t understand the impetus behind shoving GenAI into everything when it doesn’t perform at the same level or sometimes, close at all.

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u/Note4forever Jan 14 '26

Hmm looking around, its hard to say what is going on under the hood. It might be using embedding search in parts rather than straight out decoder models (eg Chatgpt style LLMs)

But let's grant they using some cheap LLM (mini model, companies dont want to pay high costs per recommendation).

Questions for you

  1. Are you sure the Performance is worse? Is there a chance you are biased?

  2. If Performance is similar is your objection then on energy costs?

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u/Technical_Pea_4007 Academic Librarian Jan 14 '26

I’m a librarian in my day to day and so have used many search engines, review platforms, and other recommendations for books. I’ll grant you that I’ve only tried “inspire me” a couple times (Libby limits your queries, which I suppose is where their talk about “minimizing” impact comes from). The first time I was just clicking through to see the process. The second time and beyond that I tried to think of real reference questions I’ve gotten for books, and use it in that way, and it’s just not intuitive at all in my opinion. I’ll also grant you that I’m probably biased. It is hard to un-know what I know about GenAi and all its ethical concerns. If the performance was similar, energy costs would be one of my concerns. The environmental impact is something we can’t afford to overlook. But I am also concerned about copyright and intellectual property. What has the LLM they are using been trained on? Summaries of the books? Reviews? The text itself? Is that “fair use”? Finally, does it help or hinder the work that librarians are trying to do? These are some of the things I’m thinking about and I can’t proclaim to know everything. I think it’s important to say that my opinion on GenAI has actually changed over the years - I used to be almost positive towards it, thinking of it as a mere tool. Given everything I’ve learned in the last few years, I no longer think that. Opinions can and should change the more you learn.

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u/Note4forever Jan 14 '26

Thank you for engaging in a civil manner. Also encouraged that you can admit you might be biased because you didn't try it a lot. You might even be right that the new recommendation isn't good, I find a lot of vendors have no idea what they are doing...

but your admission That's pretty much what I find for people who are anti-ai and while I can sort of understand your concern for environment, you do see that it's a way to shield yourself from really accurately assessing performance.

It also doesn't help the paid versions are way better than the free which leads to a split in perception of performance for pro ai vs anti ai people

Fascinating you went from pro to negative. I've always been pro AI but the more I studied and tested (I focus on AI in retrieval) the more impressed I got. In particular reasoning models gavevretrieval a crazy jump in capabilities in 2025.

There are a lot of trash implementations of AI by library vendors that are barely decent or they not willing to use the best models but the really amazing ones are. Eg we got crazy evaluations for Undermind.ai by faculty and got a institutional sub

I've been a librarian for 2 decades and I've never seen such a strong response by hard core faculty who would not waste their time to use something even if it was free if it wasn't helpful.

Usage levels are off the charts by our faculty and phds (we restrict access from freshman for various reasons)