Wow its 2026 and people are still throwing around cringe terms like "rockstar librarian" unironically & self identify as one. Lol.

Careful. Some one quoted my post and pretty much said I am "mad about rockstars" and I'm projecting or something. I can't believe it's 2026 and people are still proud of such a cringe term.

I judge them for being paternalistic based on their ACTIONS. They proudly refuse to learn or teach AI because they believe their values trump what users want. Thats a fact that has nothing to do with how you approach users

I'm trying to be fair here and yes I'm of course generalising. Pretty much everything I write now & in my blogs is generalisations but they have enough truth in them to be useful. If you want to score points and say not 100% of group X do Y, I can concede. But thats a silly game.

This is clearly unfair. To make a point, I have to pull on patterns and tendencies, other wise i couldnt say a thing. And you seem ok doing it when you play victim about how people say you will be out of a job without using ai.

The last I checked anti ai or resist ai is a label these people have proudly given to themselves & they never have a good word for ai. And if im a outright pro ai camp then why are some of my pieces heavily shared by even people in those camps?

Yeah to be fair, I'm talking about a small vocal minority. Many librarians i find behind the scenes are quite anxious because they are honest enough to know there's a lot to learn.

People are unbelievably arrogant and dismissive and up to fairly recently I have always been my restrained in my views. My whole career, I've studied and thought about whatever interests me and yet somehow studying how AI affects search is considered off limits & anti ai camp acts like I'm a villian

Yeah its all superficial. Its a combination of there really isnt much concrete to say AND even if there is few librarians have studied enough to be able to talk about it yet. That said I do think the area I study how "ai search" works , things are getting more substantial...

I saying "x" to try to avoid emotional knee jerk reactions when ai is mentioned. I'm actually curious about prob of who gets to decide what institutions buy independent of the whole ai thing. It always strikes me librarians like me have way more say than users. Sometimes I wonder if that's right

I don't want to dance around the definition of "value led instruction". But there was a popular type of "ai literacy" workshop that i call "ai goes wrong". Its just a non stop listing of cases of llms going wrong. Zero attempt to say what could have been done to avoid it. Purpose was to scare.

If you know faculty going for tenure you know its a safe bet professional success wins out...

I don't know if you will be out of a job. I do think that in 5 years time, everyone will be using tech with LLM incorporated without blinking, the same way we now use Google scholar/Wikipedia. But I know the anti ai camp doesnt agree so what's the point of arguing? And who knows i might be wrong.

I mean here its obviously rational for the researcher to form his discipline norms to get published. But I was also getting at maybe it "makes sense" in the objective good research sense

What Do We Actually Mean by "AI-Powered Search"? When we say "AI-powered search engine," we're conflating at least four different things—and your concerns about one may not apply to another.

I would say i see librarians objecting to LLMS shift from reason to reason and its very hard to pin them down. Sometimes it the environment, sometimes it hurts learning, sometimes its performance is bad etc. I wrote this whole piece to try disentangle it open.substack.com/pub/aarontay...

Yes thats the major "but" to my statement but as I said the pendulum has swung so far that saying "efficency" is instantly seen as suspect. Then you get people saying all type of friction is good cos needed for learning etc

When I blog something showing a major flaw, some of some of the same people will share my posts happily. I have zero quarrel who those who refuse to use ai for whatever reason. I have a huge prob with those who try to cancel the rest of us who want to study and use it

Please. I have advocated people be clear exactly what aspect of Ai they object to & try explain which type of ai may be acceptable. Anyway this is the part that makes me mad. Anti ai camp librarians have attacked me, made me feel unwelcome in spaces when all I did is to study & point out pros & cons

They saying it to me. But what's the difference? Unless they think im lying if their user says the same to them they may not be rude enough to say it outright but they probably would still feel the same way...

As you probably guessed what you described is perfectly compatible with what I advocate. Maybe IL is more evolved where you are but my experience reading blogs, the published literature i see a bunch of confident dumb takes & its almost always overreach by people who feel they should be educators

I wasn't even talking about buying. But ok, Well we obviously cant provide everything for practical budget reasons. But assuming budget isnt the main issue is it our jobs to decide our users values are "wrong" and they shouldn't use x even if they want to?

Exhibit 2: Librarians arguing better retrieval results (just ranking) are BAD for learning cos friction is needed for learning. While there is room for some argument here, I was so done when one said "our job is to teach them how to use search tools" No. We only do that because its a necessary evil

Exhibit 1: librarians arguing with me that highly capable ambitious tenure seeking faculty dont know what they are doing when they spend 200 per month & even more significantly TIME on mastering Claude because they find it essential. It's all hype I am told by librarians who haven't used

Sure. I didnt say all. But dont you think there is a tension between a customer service and a educator mindset which involves a moral imperative to push users to where they didnt want to go or wasn't even aware was possible? This isnt bad but its much easier to slip into the I know better mode

these days the pendulum has swung so much saying something makes our users be more efficient is almost considered a bad thing.

It is trendy nowdays in librarianship to critique efforts to improve efficiency for our users, claiming that's not the point. The last I checked- save the time of the user is a law of librarianship. not "push our views/values" on our users. I acknowledge efficency is not everything but

What i am saying is you can still be a librarian & not be shamed cos you not a "revolutionary". Besides, even if i wanted to be a revolutionary for any hard/wicked problem eg Open Access there's like half a dozen diff camps all claiming to know "the way". Who should I back. I really dont know

For example i am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that librarians must be activists. Are there things in the world I wish were different? Yes. Is it my job to force change in the world and drag the world kicking and screaming to that state? No. I'm not saying librarians cant be idealist & do that

Maybe is also my background, I'm automatically suspicious when librarians talk about librarianship's "shared/core values", trying to force me to agree because im a librarian I must have the same universal values or principles as them. I'm sure on broad level there is some overlap but its not 100%

There's this argument i see..our greatest strength is that our users trust us .so we should fight them tooth and nail when they want to do something we (the librarian but using royal we sounds better) totally disagree with otherwise we will be totally betraying their "trust" in us.