The impact of artificial intelligence on scholars: an interview with Juan D. Machin-Mastromatteo

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way knowledge is created, discovered and disseminated with a possible impact on the role of digital libraries, including the professional work of the digital librarian, which remains controversial and difficult to predict. In this context, what seems to be possible is to anticipate the impact on areas of scholars’ work, to offer adequate digital library services to the new needs. In particular, Generative AI can speed up the writing and research processes, improve cooperation, teaching and learning and provide fresh perspectives for the academic world. However, the introduction of Generative AI into academia can also present potential downsides, and this interview aims to explore the positive and negative impacts of AI on scholars as a food for thought for digital librarians.We chose to interview Juan D. Machin-Mastromatteo who with his young age represents a new generation of scholars in Library and Information Science (LIS) who are experimenting with AI.Juan D. Machin-Mastromatteo is a full-time professor at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua (UACH, Mexico) and member of the National System of Researchers (Level II). He is a Doctor in Information and Communication Science (Tallinn University), Master in Digital Library Learning (Oslo University College; Tallinn University; and Parma University) and Bachelor in Librarianship (Central University of Venezuela). He is a specialist in information literacy, action research, bibliometrics, open access and digital libraries.He has published over 150 scientific publications; has facilitated more than 40 courses; has participated in more than 120 international events as a speaker, panelist, organizer or moderator; and has facilitated over 20 workshops for training researchers. He is the Associate Editor of Information Development (SAGE), the Information Studies Journal (UACH) and until 2023 he held this position for Digital Library Perspectives (Emerald). He is also a member of the editorial advisory boards committees of The Journal of Academic Librarianship (Elsevier) and IE Revista de Investigacion Educativa (REDIECH). He has conducted peer reviews for 17 scientific journals within the fields of information science and education, for which he has evaluated over 300 manuscripts; and has also edited four special issues for various scientific journals. In Information Development he published, from 2015 to 2020, the column Developing Latin America. In 2019, he created the Juantífico Project: videos on scientific information, research and publication. From 2022, he co-hosts InfoTecarios podcast. Since 2023 he publishes the School of Editors section in the Information Studies Journal.He has excelled in different roles: as Editor, Reviewer, Author, Researcher, Educators and in particular well known for a series of tutorials (videos) to explain scholarly communication to interested researchers.Nowadays, it seems that a researcher might assume different roles. It might not be enough anymore just to conduct research, write and publish. For different reasons, we must conduct various activities related to research and teaching to improve our visibility and growth opportunities, and in each of these roles, different rules apply regarding the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).I teach at the university. I am also a researcher, and thus I am also the author of scientific publications. I also conduct peer reviews for scientific journals, and I am involved as an associate editor in two journals. Finally, I also produce educational videos related to my research and teaching topics.The use of AI in each of these roles may vary, specifically regarding how acceptable it is to use AI and under which conditions. In teaching, it might be acceptable to produce images through AI to accompany my presentations for lectures, also for finding reading materials more quickly and writing creative case scenarios for the students to solve problems. Something similar happens when I prepare a conference presentation – nowadays, a large part of the graphic content of my presentations corresponds to AI-generated images.As an author and researcher, you must be more careful about how you use AI because there are certain guidelines that you should follow. Most major publishers (including Emerald) have already set policies regarding the use of AI in research and publishing, and if you analyze those policies, it turns out that there are very few acceptable uses of AI. The only thing you can use it for is to improve your writing. These policies also point out that AI cannot be used in any case to generate content, especially for data analysis or to draw conclusions.Why is it acceptable to improve writing? The reasoning behind this seems to be that the content being passed through AI for this purpose has already been human-generated, so there’s no problem with that; the AI is just acting as a more sophisticated spelling and grammar review function than the one available in word processors. One reason why it would not be acceptable to generate content and put it in an article is related to the fact that most people use AI tools through the free versions, which give you very few options to customize the AI’s behavior. An alternative to this would be, for instance, to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT system by paying the premium subscription, which grants you access to customize ChatGPT’s behavior by configuring an assistant. For example, you can disable its ability to connect to the Internet to find responses, and you can also set very strict rules for its operation and prevent it from using sources and behaving in ways that you do not want it to.There could be other acceptable uses, such as helping in the information-seeking process. There are very useful tools such as Consensus, Scite, Connected Papers and ResearchRabbit, which help identify literature that you may have missed or literature that you must check if you’re starting a new project, and some of these offer interesting features to navigate the literature and explore the relationships among authors and publications. There are also tools that provide summaries and help in reading or even tagging the literature that you are using to have the AI help you identify topics within full texts, such as Scispace. AI tools may help review the literature in a faster way; however, you must not use the content that the AI generates for you as is, without confirming its validity and without substantially transforming it.My main concern with AI-generated content is that I simply don’t trust how AI works, e.g. it seems to be somewhat lazy and not comprehensive. Also, its responses tend to be very enumerative; its analysis might not be as deep as I would like it to be. In any case, the tool cannot guess what the human wants or how the human will make a proper analysis. These considerations, I feel, are especially valid within the humanities and social sciences, where analyses and meanings are so complex.For journal editors and reviewers, other sets of rules apply. Under both roles, you must be aware that you are handling original manuscripts, which are, of course, not published, and hence, these are confidential works that must be treated accordingly. If you check them with an AI, you do not know how AI tools might be ingesting these manuscripts that you want to process through it. While the AI might not publish the manuscripts or upload them to public servers, the contents of manuscripts checked through AI could be used to further train the language model and become part of its knowledge base. This raises serious privacy and confidentiality concerns, as the authors might not authorize the use of their intellectual property in this manner.There is the recent example of the publisher Taylor and Francis, which sold access to publications under their banner to Microsoft AI, and authors are not too happy about it. The current issue being discussed is: do we, as authors, want this to happen? The publisher has made a financial deal with an AI company, and as authors, we are not profiting from that, nor do we know the extent to which our intellectual property is being used. I doubt the publisher asked authors for their permission to use their publications in this manner, and older publishing agreements do not include provisions about this usage of authors’ intellectual property (do current agreements include this?). Of course, there could be alternatives in the near future where we can install local AI solutions (meaning, they are not online, and there are some currently available options) that might be tailored in a way that allows us to screen new manuscripts and perform some automatic evaluations on them while at the same time preventing the use of these contents in any other way.Regarding the production of videos as part of a scientific dissemination process and to extend my reach as an educator in the topics of scientific information, research and publication, I am a bit more free to experiment and use AI. Many people will have seen some videos that are fully generated with AI by now. I feel that these kinds of videos are, to say the least, dry. They might be unnecessarily long, and they often develop arguments in circles, not even getting to the main topic. The human touch is very important when communicating anything, and this fact is relevant to any of the roles we have discussed.The main question here might be: if I use AI to produce content, why should I pretend to have a human audience for it? If I was not able to produce content with my human intelligence, why should other humans bother to follow me?In any case, for the purposes of producing videos, I have found some AI support, particularly to help create video covers or thumbnails with image generation tools, e.g. with DALL-E, which is included in ChatGPT’s premium subscription. However, human input is crucial, so the resulting images originate from sophisticated prompts, and I edit them further. For instance, I can add my own picture or other elements to compose a better thumbnail, such as adding some text to make it more informative and draw users to click on it.I have also experimented with using AI to act as a marketing officer for my content. Making videos, promoting them, managing the channels and other social media sites is a lot of work – and it is something that I do entirely on my own, with the few resources I can afford and with my own skills. 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