What's in a name?

Strange how, in the last 2 weeks I've had two reasons to question what a library is.

When doing some reading with my eldest, there was the question, "Is a library still a library if there are no books in it?" Good question, although not one that my daughter really cared about being able to answer.

And then at work, when deciding on a naming convention for our document repository / archive / library. We settled on library in the end (+82,000 documents and counting, including Sustainability reports).

Why's this of any interest? [clue, this isn't a post talking about libraries]

As we surge through the AI hype-cycle, you can't move without businesses dropping in references to artificial intelligence buzzwords: large language models, generative AI, unsupervised learning and natural language processing to name a few. It helps with your SEO, it helps get press releases picked up, it helps get people to click on your content. "AI click-bait", at least that's the plan.

But does connecting chatGPT to your database and letting users surface answers in a snazzy interface make you an AI business? It certainly makes your results powered by AI, which sounds great. Your business has AI embedded in its functionality, so just as a library with no books is still a library, I'd say your business with embedded AI is an AI business. Cool.

But, and this is the question that I can't answer. Does it actually deliver more value for your end users? Do people come back again and again to your product because the introduction of AI delivers a superior outcome to the problem they are trying to solve. The jury is out here.

Perhaps that doesn't matter, if it gets you more sales and helps your raise more investment, it's worth it. But will it benefit in the medium and long-term? Jumping on bandwagons feels good at the time, but product development through jumping on bandwagons is a BAD idea, even though it is tempting in the extreme.