The Distant Librarian

Have you trained an AI?

Thanks to Mita Williams for pointing to this Washington Post article that makes it trivial to search and see whether any sites you're affiliated with have been used to train "Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA." The entire article is interesting, but it's more fun to plug in the URLs of any websites you want to check against. This blog, and MPOW, are both represented:

Is anyone aware of a similarly-simple way of searching the entire Common Crawl dataset, or is that just too massive to do?

If you're curious to know whether any of your images or artwork have been used to train one of the image AI's, you can do that, too!

 

 

Hydrator is dead. Thanks for nothing, Elno

Ed Summers reports on the GitHub repository for Hydrator that, 

Twitter's changes to their API which greatly reduce the amount of read-only access means that the Hydrator is no longer a useful application. The application keys, which functioned for the last 7 years, have been rescinded by Twitter.

Today sucks :-(

ChatGPTLibrarian is still finding his (its?) voice

One of my alerts just tripped over a new blog called ChatGPTLibrarian. The site was launched in March 2023 by librarian Victor Santiago, and I think he's still trying to decide if he's going to write as him, or as an AI-assisted author. The header of each page reads,

Welcome to ChatGPTLibrarian, a blog dedicated to exploring the possibilities of using artificial intelligence and chatbots in the field of librarianship. Our articles delve into the innovative ways ChatGPT can assist with research, reference services, and information retrieval. Join us as we explore the intersection of technology and librarianship.

and many of the posts seem like throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, or may be ChatGPT outputs to specific prompts, but there are a few posts with some good ideas and tips and tricks, including,

• Dealing with ambiguous ChatGPT answers
• Citing ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Guide to Proper Attribution (no attribution though on where this advice was found)
• Free ChatGPT and AI Search Engines Sites for Librarians

Anyhoo, if you're trying to pay attention to the use of chatbots in libraries, this is probably worth keeping an eye on. Oh, it's entirely possible Victor's just running this site hoping to generate some ad revenue! I first visited with an ad-blocker running, but after turning it off I see there are a LOT of ads, so be warned! :-)