I'm studying information and I'm sick of 'AI' so I tried using it a bit

The title says it all on this one really. Currently I'm in my first year of a postgraduate diploma of Information Studies, specialising in library studies. Unfortunately for me, information and shitty bastard tools like Large Language Models get along like a house on fire, and I've been exposed to more literature suggesting the use of that crap than I would like to be. (The ideal amount of exposure would be none.)

This hatred doesn't come from a fear that these technologies could replace me as a librarian, and that's not really what I want to write about right now so describing how stupid that all is will have to wait for another day. Right now I want to talk about how stupid and useless LLMs are for studying.

AI as a magical bullet for students is a raging talking point, as children and teens cheat themselves out of education by using LLMs. As a highly technologically adept (I hope) person in my 20s, I could probably also do this without much trouble. In fact, I've already seen other people in my degree do this. Suspiciously stiff and specious comments on shared articles come back as 94% likely to be written by AI - unsurprising given their total lack of original thought. It boggles the mind - you're studying information! Oh my god!! What are you expecting to happen once you go out into the workplace and get asked a question about a topic you bullshitted your way through with ChatGPT? Do you think the person asking your opinion on destroying physical copies of digitised media will be happy to let you skulk away to a computer for fifteen minutes, and come back with a flaccid non-answer cooked up for you by a statistics machine? Jesus Christ.

But I'd be lying if I said the thought of letting ChatGPT 'help me along' with work isn't tempting. One of my core flaws when writing essays is that I never elaborate enough on my thoughts, ending up with too-short essays that introduce ideas but don't flesh them out enough. That's exactly what ChatGPT can help with - taking a short piece of text and puffing it up with pointless bloat. So I figure I may as well give it a try, and see how useful ChatGPT is for an assignment.

My most recent assignment was to write an essay on the information professions and Te Ao Māori. We're already in rocky territory here vis a vis Māori data sovereingty. As a human who didn't use AI, I decided to write about Te Reo Māori and its integration in New Zealand's public library system. This decision was based on a few things:

• The amount of literature available on the subject

• My personal interests (libraries, yay!)

• My level of prior understanding of the subject

ChatGPT doesn't know any of that, and even if I told it to consider those things it would only be guessing. So let's go and ask ChatGPT to pick a topic for me.The suggestions it gave were as follows:

1. Cultural Competence in Information Professions
2. Māori Knowledge Systems and Information Management
3. Digital Sovereignty and Māori Data
4. The Role of Libraries in Supporting Māori Language and Culture
5. Indigenous Archiving Practices
6. Information Literacy in Māori Education
7. Collaboration Between Information Professionals and Māori Communities
8. The Impact of Technology on Māori Knowledge Sharing
9. Ethical Considerations in Information Sharing with Māori
10. Māori Perspectives on Information Privacy and Security

Not bad on first blush, but

• 1 and 9 are the same thing

• 2 and 5 are the same thing

• 3, 8 and kind of 10 are the same thing

• This doesn't take into account the amount of literature available on these subjects, my personal interests, or my level of prior understanding of the subject¹

So ChatGPT has given me five generic prompts, which I could, theoretically, pick from and investigate how much literature the topic has. This wouldn't save much time if any, since the alternative I used is typing 'te ao māori library' into my university's library website and seeing what comes up.

The next step is finding references. This was hard, as sometimes I had to burrow several tabs deep into a website to find the correct link or pdf. Sometimes I couldn't use a reference at all because it wasn't digitised, or wasn't shared with my university. I asked ChatGPT to find me references. If you're curious, this is the verbatim response.

Hayes, L. (2021). Kaupapa Māori in New Zealand public libraries. Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Retrieved from https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/2021-11-12-kaupapa-maori-in-new-zealand-public-libraries

Lilley, S. (2021). How can university libraries become more representative of, and responsive to, indigenous communities? Gateways to Knowledge. Retrieved from https://www.acu.ac.uk

Allen + Clarke. (2021). Toward a value proposition of libraries in Aotearoa: Review of selected literature. National Library of New Zealand. Retrieved from https://natlib.govt.nz

Te Ara Tika. (2021). Māori and libraries in New Zealand – Staying the distance. World Libraries. Retrieved from https://worldlibraries.dom.edu

MacDonald, T. (2012). The experience of Māori in New Zealand libraries: A study of the integration of Te Reo Māori. [Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington]. Retrieved from https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz

None of these have links that actually go to the paper in question, and one of the links doesn't work at all. The first and fourth papers have incorrect publish dates. The second suggestion isn't a published paper at all. The third suggestion isn't relevant. The fourth suggestion's link isn't to a publisher, but a very 1990's-core website which gives me an error when I click the 'home' button. The fifth suggestion doesn't appear to exist. Hooray for LLMs!

Now that I've got a bunch of lovely useless references, I have to write my paper. I started in reality by writing a hamburger-style structure. You know - opening, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, conclusion. ChatGPT was OK at this, but it didn't adhere to the assignment instructions for what topics needed to be covered. I can't give it all the assignment instructions, because the instructions are more than a page long. It also suggests some weird shit, such as:

• "Call to Action: Encourage libraries, policymakers, and communities to work together to promote the use of Te Reo Māori in public spaces." (This is a postgraduate essay, not a political speech.)

• "Vision for the Future: Envision a future where Te Reo Māori is fully integrated into library services, benefiting all communities." (Again, this is a postgraduate essay. It's about synthesising available information, not suggesting solutions or hypotheticals.)

This is probably the most useful thing ChatGPT has done so far, and even then it's not very good at it because it fundamentally lacks enough context to do anything helpful. If I had all the information I needed for it to be helpful, well, I'd have a structure already by then, wouldn't I?

Finally I have to write the damn thing. I asked ChatGPT to expand on one of the structural sentences I wrote down: "[Write about] how New Zealand’s first libraries were a colonial project and based on british library systems, devaluing Maori knowledge and methods." I asked it to include references and quotes.

The paragraph it gave me was shit. Neither quote was real, one quote reference was hallucinated, and the paragraph used vague wording unacceptable for the topic - for example, saying New Zealand's first libraries were 'established in the 19th century'. It also provided a spurious conclusion: "Consequently, the colonial framework of these early libraries perpetuated a narrative that undervalued Māori ways of knowing, emphasizing the need for a more inclusive and culturally responsive library system that recognizes and celebrates indigenous knowledge today." Describing the colonial system as 'perpetuating a narrative' seems subtly racist to me, given that libraries were not 'perpetuating a narrative' but systematically and intentionally replacing and devaluaing taonga. As usual, ChatGPT provided something prettily written, but totally worthless.

So, ChatGPT did not help. Could it have been more helpful with better prompts? Yes, absolutely. But my argument with this is that if I know what will give me a good response, I already have a clear view of what I want. And if I know what I want, I can write it myself. The only usable information ChatGPT was able to puke out was misattributed names of papers I could have found far more directly with a single search of keywords using my University's library.

This was a whole lot of writing to basically say that I fucking hate ChatGPT, and that's partly because it's not even good at the things I might have wanted to use it for if it fucking worked. Fuck this stupid technology, man.

All my searches were done using Duck.ai, which prevents generative ai companies from training on my questions. Due to having to use ChatGPT to write this, which is environmentally destructive, I donated $5 to the New Zealand Nature Fund.

My searches using GPT-4o mini:

1. suggest topics for an essay about the information professions and Te Ao Māori

2. Find me 5 references in literature in APA referencing for the topic 'The integration of Te Reo Māori in New Zealand’s public libraries'

3. Write a paragraph about the following topic: "How New Zealand’s first libraries were a colonial project and based on british library systems, devaluing Maori knowledge and methods." Include references and quotes.