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Web 2.0

Document or Disappear: How AI Is Forcing Us to Finally Write It All Down

We are currently in a technological limbo. Some of us are actively documenting our work in order to create AI prompts that will effectively do that tedious work for us, while also waiting for our jobs to change (or worst-case-scenario disappear) as AI gets better at doing more and more of our work. My colleague Dan commented on this as I was telling him about the AI prompt I’d created while working on getting some magazine statistics together. I wrote the prompt as I did the work, until it came out right. Once I’d done that, I asked the AI to create a prompt that I can use each month to get these exact numbers and information from the identically formatted spreadsheet the vendor sends me each month. Dan noted that this process is prompting us to document workflows that should have been recorded long ago. He’s right. My final command to the AI was to create a workflow and put it and the prompt in a PDF I could share with my coworkers so that they knew how to get those numbers should I get hit by a bus – or fired by an AI employment decision*. This struck me as funny; a sort of “AI documentation paradox”.

I don’t really believe that my job is in great danger. Librarianship did not became obsolete with any of the previous technological “revolutions”. These revolutions have not, in the past, eliminated jobs as a whole even while they might eliminate specific jobs. They transform them, create new ones, and change the environment of everyone’s job, really, but they have historically never created a net loss of jobs. From the printing press to the personal computer to the Internet to Wikipedia, all of these revolutionary steps in technology have only increased employment and available jobs for humans. I don’t see much different, in the long run, with AI. What’s funny, though, is that this revolution is actually forcing us to do the sort of thing we’ve always needed to do, but never have time for (as software coders around the world can agree) – document our work. Libraries are no different – we may have organized workflows and streamlined processes, but we don’t document things any better than your average junior coder does. This kind of documentation is necessary for passing on institutional knowledge, if nothing else!

So, what we each need to decide is how we’re going to meet this AI revolution. Shall we meet it halfway, giving it the tedious, mind-numbing, annoying work that we all must do every month for our continued employment? Or shall we hide our heads in the sand and pretend that this new technology isn’t going to revolutionize** our jobs and our working environment and just continue on as we’ve been doing, until we get replaced. Not by AI, but by someone who knows how to leverage AI to better do your job.

* This is not actually anything I’m worried about right now. AI can do a lot but it cannot talk panicky librarians down from the proverbial ledge when things go wrong at their library, so my job is relatively safe for now.

** I’d say no pun intended, but it totally was intended. Completely so.