This report explores how visual arts librarians in colleges and universities are using Bard, ChatGPT, AI-enabled Bing, DallE-2, Midjourney and other artificial intelligence applications in visual arts librarianship. The report furnishes highly specific data on the use of these and other applications, as well as specific datasets on exactly how librarians are using these programs. The study has specific data on use of AI for image editing, image recognition, image tagging, image generation from text, metadata development, data analysis, finding and summarizing content and other uses of artificial intelligence. Survey respondents also answer open ended questions about their current and future plans for AI use in visual arts librarianship, and about the information sources they use to learn about AI.
It also looks at the impact of AI on other applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Artstor, GIMP, Affinity and other applications, precisely defining the impact of AI on use of each.
This benchmarking study presents data from 24 visual arts librarians from a range of colleges and universities in the USA and abroad. Data in the report is broken out by numerous personal and institutional variables including age and gender of the respondents, and college private/public status, Carnegie class or type, enrollment, and tuition level of the much more.
Just a few of this 132-page report’s many findings are that:
• About 28% of librarians sampled are using artificial intelligence to summarize content.
• Use of artificial intelligence for image editing was more common by librarians working at public than private colleges or universities.
• Librarians in specialized art colleges are somewhat more inclined than others to use AI tools for image recognition and 75% used them “somewhat” or “a lot” for this purpose.
• 45.83% believe that the introduction of AI tools won't impact their use of Artstor. 16.67% believe they might use Artstor more and 8.33% felt that they would use it much more; none felt that they would use it less.
• 29.17% of respondents have used Bard. Most use was by librarians at low tuition schools with highest use among schools charging less than $9,300 with 50% using Bard.