Illuminating, thought-provoking, and fun – that’s the gist of the webinar, supplied by participants, not ChatGPT.
Organised by the Singapore Alliance of University Libraries – Research Services Task Force (SAUL-RSTF), the webinar took place on 1 Nov 2023. The objective of the webinar is to provide a platform for knowledge sharing on the promises and challenges of AI in Scholarly Communication, as well as exchanges of new ideas, where participants could gain insights from one another.
After the opening notes by Yuyun Wirawati, Chair of SAUL-RSTF, the session started with a presentation from Lucy Lu Wang (University of Washington).
Lucy’s sharing emphasised on human-AI collaborative systems and presented a sneak peek into recent research on visual abstracts, text-to-card, and alt text writer.
While AI tools bring many benefits, Deborah Fitchett (Lincoln University) cautioned risks that AI may cause, from biased selection of sources to complete destruction!
Andy Tattersall (University of Sheffield) made everyone chuckle with his experiments using various AI tools. Undoubtedly, the tools are promising, and may potentially assist librarians and researchers in better communicating the scholarly outputs.
Next, Aaron Tay (Singapore Management University) performed a sci-fi storytelling, with assistance from ChatGPT+ and DALL-E3. The story was quite dark, with dystopian scenarios of completely Open Access and non-Open Access world. Luckily, the dystopian world was just a dream…
Katie Peace (Taylor & Francis) mentioned that transparency would become more critical as a result of AI-tools in publishing. Clarity is important when determining the ‘author’ and identifying the tools employed in the creation of a book or image.
The webinar ended with two rapid-fire presentations from SMU’s Generate Your L(AI)brary Hackathon winners, SMU AI and librarybuddies. The Hackathon showcased how library could collaborate with students and researchers to reimagine the future of libraries and research through the power of AI.
A BIG thank you to all speakers and 176 participants from 9 countries for making this webinar a success!
The programme and recordings of the webinar are accessible at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/rstf2023/program/
Contributed by:
Singapore Alliance of University Libraries, Research Services Task Force