Where does ChatGPT fit into the Framework for Information Literacy? The possibilities and problems of AI in library instruction

Abstract

Figure 1 was what was generated when we asked ChatGPT, the generative AI system that has been the subject of a thousand hot takes about how it’s disrupting academia-as-we-know-it, to describe itself for an academic librarian audience. Perhaps it’s learning a bit too much from the public relations documents that were a part of the vast amounts of data it was trained on, when it describes itself as “highly relevant,” “invaluable,” and “accurate.” It did not, however, bring up the caveat that greets you when you open up ChatGPT itself: that it “may occasionally generate incorrect information,” that it “may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content,” or that it has “limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021.” In addition, it doesn’t bring up the reddest of academic red flags—that ChatGPT provides an easy way for students to cheat and plagiarize. The Atlantic has claimed that because of ChatGPT and other AI, “the undergraduate essay [which] has been at the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations . . . is about to be disrupted from the ground up.” A writer at Times Higher Education has suggested that allowing AI to replace a student’s creative voice means “abandoning our responsibilities as educators.”