Survey of Use of Artificial Intelligence in Visual Arts Librarianship

Survey of Use of Artificial Intelligence in Visual Arts Librarianship

Overall Sample: This was a very common use for AI and 12.5% used it “a great deal” while another 16.67% used it “a lot” for this purpose, and another 16.67% “somewhat” while 4.17% responded “not much.” However, overall half of all respondents used AI to generate images from text. Though such use was profuse across the sample, it was concentrated only in one respect. Virtually all use of any kind was by respondents under age 45.

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.