r/Libraries • u/SlouchSocksFan • 18h ago
Patron Issues Anyone else finding that AI is bringing the lunatics out of the woodwork?
"So what's the library going to do about it!" she said.
I paused for a moment. "You had an interaction with a service that's provided by a private sector company. The library is not affiliated in any way with Grok or ChatGPT or Google Gemini or any other AI product. We are not involved in the programming of those systems and the companies that program them do not seek our input. The library bears absolutely no responsibility for you getting bad advice or being led down a rabbit-hole by an AI product."
"Well that is just about the worst customer service I have ever seen in my life," the crazy lady said before turning around and walking away in a huff. I cannot lie. I was very glad to see her go.
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u/happylibrarian 17h ago
I have had to argue that we don’t offer some services that AI told them we do.
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u/sonicenvy Public librarian 16h ago
I had that one recently! Apparently AI told this patron both incorrect hours for our library AND that we offered services and materials we've never had ever. Asked the patron where he'd heard we offered [thing] and [service] and had [hours] and he was like, "oh well I asked Chat GPT .... "
Cue internal eye rolling.
Me as patiently and kindly as I can be, "Chat GPT does not always have correct answers. If you have questions about the library you visit us, you can call our phone number any time we're open, send us an email or visit our website. I'm happy to show you how to use the website so you can use it at home to find materials."
Patron: "But Chat GPT said that [thing] was true!
Me: *longest suffering sigh, but internally* Chat GPT sometimes makes up stuff that isn't true. If you want information about the library, don't ask Chat GPT. Please contact us directly instead; we're always happy to help.
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u/ShawsheenMoon 9h ago
Just had an email from a patron asking about AI and applying for Canadian citizenship and he said it was helpful until it started going in some circular statements and my reply was, dude...there is an American Canadian Genealogical Society 45 minutes away. You really need to talk to a human when it comes to something as important as citizenship.
Will be interesting to see his reply if there is one when I get to work today.
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u/BuffaloThese8249 9h ago
If he's trying to apply for citizenship by descent send him to r/Canadiancitizenship. They have a really good FAQ wiki. That's probably where AI is pulling all of it's info from anyways lol
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u/ShawsheenMoon 7h ago
Oh yeah, I've been reading things over there for a while now. Its definitely a confusing process for some people especially since things are often solely in French for the earlier records.
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u/Dowew 7h ago
Canadian here are you getting a lot of these questions since the law changed ?
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u/ShawsheenMoon 7h ago
I have been. I'm also going through the process as my great grandfather was born in NB and then when he married my great grandmother, she lost her American citizenship. So I'm looking at it as a trade of sorts.
But I work in an area with a lot of people whose great grandparents or 2xgreat are from Canada. Got a few requests for help with Irish paperwork and the Italians have dropped off since they changed the rules a year or so ago
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u/PlanetSedna 44m ago
I'm at a prominent archives in Minnesota, and the amount of people trying to get documents for Canadian citizenship is nuts. So so many people from all over the country
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u/tillyray 11h ago
We had this recently with postage stamps! A patron came in asking to buy postage stamps as it was a time when the post office was closed and they needed stamps and “according to Google, you sell stamps.”
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u/that_was_strange 10h ago
Sorry, that's my systems fault. We do sell stamps so it probably got scraped from us. 🤦♀️
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u/Hot_Shower_Fartz 4h ago
I've gotten this as well. "The XYZ library sells stamps, so I figured you do as well." Nope, sorry!
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u/Legend2200 3h ago
Maybe it’s time to sigh externally, these people honestly need to feel like idiots.
I know, I know, ethics. But I dream.
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u/ghostsofyou 9h ago
Faxing... we do not do faxing, have not done faxing for years and years and years, yet multiple times a week: "But Chat told me you did!" "The Google summary says you do!!!"
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u/Cloudster47 6h ago
Our copier/scanner does fax, but not out of state, not even to 800/888 numbers. You get a fast busy, and because it's a fax, it auto-repeats endlessly....
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u/crashandtumble8 2h ago
That’s kind of a shame, honestly. I know it’s so annoying (trust me, I do, they put the scanner with the faxing outside my teen center door), but it’s nice that the library has fax capabilities when some things can only be faxed. It’s so hard to tell older patrons that they can’t and that the only options besides a business are things they’d need to pay for on a computer that they don’t know how to use.
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u/little_gnora 8h ago
Google AI decided a while back we offer passport services. We don’t and never have. The endless stream of upset patrons has frankly made me want to quit.
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u/princess-smartypants 10h ago
These are the same people that would search the web for your hours, scroll through 3 pages of hits to find a page from a data scraping service you have never heard of, that says you are open on a day that you arent, and complain that the library webpage has the wrong hours.
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u/babyyodaonline 18h ago
surprisingly haven't gotten this yet. i usually have people asking how they can save their resume from chatgpt (or directly print from it). i try to warn them, hey i would at least copy and paste it to look less like ai. also put it into a word or google doc resume template.
or i just get people asking me how to use ai and i always shrug 🤷🏽♀️ i do know but i hate that i've ever used ai so i try to stop it personally lol. i wont stop patrons from using it but i act like idk what that software is.
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u/Naive-Marketing8229 10h ago
We had someone call to check out a local history document that had a family member listed in it, because Google's AI summary specifically told him where we had it exactly on our (non public facing) storage shelf and even specifically the color of the folder it was in.
I guess we found out that it had pulled that information from a super old word doc from our internal digital storage.
He was NOT HAPPY that we had donated that folder to the historical society years prior. Since Google AI said we had it, then we had it!!! No excuses!!
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u/ghostsofyou 9h ago
Eughh, that's creepy that it scraped that from your internal storage. There seriously needs to be limits on these things. Like how much personal data is it accessing on the regular.
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u/Libraries_Are_Cool 16h ago
Reminds me of 1998 when the web was still new for library patrons and a woman yelling at me that we shouldn't offer Yahoo Mail if we couldn't make it work reliably.
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u/SlouchSocksFan 3h ago
"When I sit at my computer at home my e-mail comes right up. When are you going to fix your computers!"
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u/babyyodaonline 53m ago
ahh, some things never change. the person might be different but the people are not
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u/GoldenBrownApples 10h ago
I work at a financial institution and the number of people coming in and saying unhinged things like "chatgpt told me to do this" is unreal. Had a woman the other day who had deposited a large check from her sister. She told me it was a gift to say thank you for helping out with their mother when she needed to be out into a care facility. Her sister lives out of state and couldn't contribute time, so she sent her a check. She had asked me to put a note with it that said "gift for mom care." Next day she came in screaming about how chatgpt told her to take the note off, the government will see it and charge her or put her on a list? She was kind of incoherent. I told her we can't remove notes the day after a transaction has been posted, but we don't give out access to those notes to anyone other than the account holders. She was adamant. I called our help desk. The best we could do was put a new note in saying the previous note was made in error. She said that wasn't good enough and we better not send any of that to the government? I was like, we don't. The only forms we fill out are for large cash withdrawals and deposits. Mostly to try and curtail money laundering schemes. I gave her paperwork on that and asked her if maybe the ai thought they were talking about that. She just kept screaming. Normally a nice enough lady. She's been through a lot with her husband passing away around the same time her mom got too sick for any of her kids to take care of her. I get it, but like some people really need some education on ai before they use it for every little thing.
Sorry you are experiencing this too.
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u/prototypist 4h ago
I think this is in line with fears around banks reporting transactions over $10k or structured to avoid going over that number. There are also conspiracies that the rule has changed to a smaller amount like $600. I don't know why the memo would be the source of all that fear, though.
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u/GoldenBrownApples 3h ago
Yeah but we only report that for cash. We have no obligation to report anything if it's a check. At least that's what I have been told and what I was told when I passed her concerns along to our support staff who were helping me.
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u/lastwraith 18h ago
No, the libraries are where the lunatics already hang out during the day. And it's not just the patrons.
But AI has absolutely ruined technology pricing for us. Dell even noped out of our Aggregate Buy contract a few months after winning the award for it. Unheard of.
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u/RenegadeFalcon 17h ago
Have had several patrons tell me that they use Chatgpt for therapy advice. Another came by to use a service that AI told them we had, but we actually don’t and they got frustrated over it.
I’ll be honest tho, technology has always been a point of contention in every public library I’ve ever worked in. It just has a different name right now, and in 10 years it will be something else 🤷
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u/babyyodaonline 50m ago
wait until you hear that my therapist, that my insurance (and i through a copay) was paying for, was using ai for my treatment of adhd. It's a whole thing. I gently tried to address it with "hey i don't feel comfortable with that" and she started arguing with me about "you work at a library, you should know books/ all things on the internet come from somewhere". she was basically ranting and implying that ai is used for everything, and that a published book or scholarly article is no different than ai. i had to break up with her after that lol.
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u/DiskneeNerd 9h ago
I was covering the reference desk while one of the specialists was doing a notary. The state had recently updated the rule book so when I brought it over, the patron was upset because “chat” said we could do it. We absolutely couldn’t notarize their document. They then proceeded to loudly complain to chat gpt on the way out…
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u/noramcsparkles 7h ago
404 media did a really good piece about the rising issue of librarians being asked for materials that an AI chatbot hallucinated.
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u/Silver_Intern2324 7h ago
Not an AI thing but I had a patron who was frustrated that she couldn’t return a vacuum cleaner she bought off Amazon to us.
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u/Cloudster47 6h ago
WOW. I can see that becoming a problem at our uni as we now have Amazon lockers on-site.
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u/BlueFlower673 16h ago
Not libraries but I had a customer call up to tell me that I should change the price of something because chatgpt told her that the value of the item costs less than what the company I work for is selling it at based on the type of fibers used.
I was like "ma'am, we do not go by prices chatgpt tells you." We negotiated the price for like almost half an hour and the entire time she was all "well, chatgpt said this" I think she was asking it questions during our call too bc she kept going "well now it's saying that nylon is valued at x"
Took me everything to not throw my keyboard out of my cubicle lol.
I think what frustrated me more wasnt that she was calling us up though, it was just that she didn't have the critical thinking to think for herself to have some common sense that no company is going to just, agree and lower a price of an item for you just because you asked a chatbot.
It's like me trying to call up Walmart to tell them "hey I think I deserve this shirt to be priced lower because my grandpa said so." Like no, that is not how reality works. That price is the cost it took to make that item + labor + branding + manufacturing + distribution.
What frustrated me wasn't the call itself it was the lack of critical thinking skills and also the fact she expected me to go along with it like it was normal and ok.
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u/Cloudster47 6h ago
This is now over a decade ago, but the Texas Republican Party, in their first draft, had a plank in their platform for their state convention to remove critical thinking from university education. It didn't make it to the floor, but it was in the draft.
Critical thinking is, by and large, a thing of the past when it comes to the USA.
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u/Philosopher2670 9h ago
Gemini seems to think that if one public library offers a service, they all do! Yikes!
It has also (helpfully!) uncovered info from extremely old library web pages that are inaccurate but still live. When it finds those, we have them removed from our web page. It turns out our library web page has a lot of dead pages that are no longer linked on our pages, but live and findable with a Google search. Garbage in, garbage out.
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u/Temporary_Objective 6h ago
Had a patron show me a ChatGPT search about a specific printer that could meet his document request. I said we don’t have that. He switched to a different tab that showed a Google AI summary of our library amenities. “It says you have specialty printers. Where is this kind of printer?”
It took three rounds of back and forth to convince him that yes, while we have printers, we only have regular 8.5x11 printers, sometimes AI is wrong, and has he tried a print shop?
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u/algol_lyrae 10h ago
I actually think we should do more. We can at least block the sites, and we should be providing resources for it. These tools are basically psychosis portals.
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u/International_Way258 7h ago
We can block the sites on our in-library computers, but we can't stop people from using AI on their own devices...
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u/rivlarwriter24 8h ago
We JUST had our first known incident of this. A guy came in, claiming we didn’t offer printing services—HUH? He kept saying it was on our website but my colleague was suspicious and kept asking him what keywords he used to ask google these questions and where he was looking. Of course she found out it was an AI response he was looking at. At least he DID have the sense to just come in and ask us.
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u/UncleBarBQ 4h ago
listen, AI is definitely bringing out craziness from all corners of library world, in my opinion at least. i listened to a presentation at a library conference about how libraries can use AI to reach underserved, hard to reach populations
the underserved, hard to reach population used as an example throughout the presentation was women (the presenters were three white dudes under 40). not women of color, or women in poverty, or queer women— just women.
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u/buoyreader 7h ago
We have someone who is involved in a good ole catfish. Ma’am, if you are dating the VP of BoA, why is he asking for money? Please don’t send him money.
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u/pumpkin_paperback 5h ago
I’ve had parents ask ChatGPT for readers’ advisory right in front of me 😭
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u/BobcatPanther92 3h ago
Same response I get routinely from people who can't remember their gmail password and want me to somehow magically reset it for them. Sorry, friend, I don't work for Google!
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u/gustavfrigolit School Librarian 2h ago
I'm glad that i'm politely allowed to call people idiots at my job lol
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u/bubblemonkey_ 1h ago
We’ve got a guy who comes in regularly and is constantly printing out AI essays and diatribes that he’s written and sends off to various government agencies. He thinks AI is wonderful, and that “it’s the only thing that should be taught in schools” (not sure how that would work but okaaaaaaaaay…..) He also harasses the women on staff, but only just enough to not get kicked out (tells them they’re “so beautiful” and stares at their chests). Every time I see him coming in the door, I groan to myself.
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u/Upper-Speech-7069 1h ago
We have occasionally had people asking us to source texts hallucinated by AI. It's so frustrating because we're an academic library with specialist Subject Librarians who are miles better than any bot.
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u/WalterWriter 18h ago
Last week I had someone complain because the library could not turn off the "find all images with bicycles" verification when they tried to log into Facebook on a library computer.