As in many fields, when considering the future of librarianship, Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings about a plethora of new questions. Impacts on the future of the information field are speculated on with a number of answers. Will librarianship become obsolete? Will the humanity of librarianship become more important than ever?
While speculating, we can always look to the past to offer parallels to our present. Take the debut of Wikipedia for example. As a crowdsourced spring of information, there is a lot of similarities to large language models like ChatGPT and its implications in the classroom. There was a panic in academic settings and libraries, then once the dust settled, we adapted. “Even the most strident critics eventually came around. Wikipedia gained recognition in campus libraries as a tertiary source, collections that summarize and repackage existing information” (Fister).
My reflection on this module is the general adage which states that there is nothing new under the sun. Just as Wikipedia posed new questions for the field to answer, so will tools like ChatGPT. Librarianship is not one single thing but a number of functions in flux. “There have been many disruptive technologies and always will be” (Papini). We can continue to turn to our communities to see reflected what works and what doesn’t, and adapt as is necessary.