The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
The third session on Saturday, New A.I. Tools and Indexing: Do We Welcome Our Robot Overlords? was presented by John Magee, Cengage Gale’s Director of Metadata Services. Magee focused his discussion on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)’s current and future influence on indexing.
He described DALL-E, a generative AI technology that enables users to create new images with text to graphics prompts. DALL-E generates the most probable input match from a database of hundreds of millions of images and captions. John tested the generator with sample alt-text that described a photo he had taken and later with a caption from a press photo. He concluded that DALL-E generally supports the quality of alt-text and captions but has problems with the details and the wording of the prompt.
Next, he discussed Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. These giant databases, filled with text generated by humans, are not necessarily reliable. Large Language Models return statistically probable answers but cannot distinguish truth from fiction; hence, they are prone to hallucinations, returning fictitious/erroneous results, and plagiarism. John gave examples of AI producing convincing abstracts of articles, however, indexes for Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and controlled vocabularies like Library of Congress subject headings, were flawed and lacked alphabetical order, locators, and included headings for persons and things that did not appear in the text.
He concluded that AI could generate impressive, convincing results, but is prone to hallucinations and errors. AI could also produce lots of text at little cost, but there are many moral, philosophical, and legal questions, especially regarding the misuse, of the technology. While AI simulates intelligence, actual intelligence is not part of its model.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss the last Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.