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Got called out by a librarian at the Seattle public library for using AI to recommend books
I was at the downtown branch last Tuesday pulling up ChatGPT to suggest my next read, and a librarian walked over and said "you're robbing yourself of discovery." She showed me the old card catalog system and how they still keep a physical staff picks wall, and honestly the recommendations were way better than anything an algorithm gave me. Has anyone else found that humans just do a better job than AI at picking things for you? (Even in non-book contexts, I'm curious.)
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uma_williams1mo agoTop Commenter
Yeah, I noticed this same thing at a coffee shop last month actually. There was a list of house favorites handwritten on a chalkboard and the barista suggested something totally off menu that matched exactly what I was craving. It got me thinking about how we've kind of trained ourselves to skip over the human element in so many small decisions now. Like maybe we're so used to algorithms picking our music and our movies that we forgot people have a gut feeling about what fits your mood. I mean, a person can read your hesitation or your excitement in a way a machine just can't.
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the_claire1mo ago
A friend told me a clerk at a small bookstore picked out three novels for her just from watching her browse the shelves.
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ryan_shah381mo ago
Three bucks, that's all it cost me to learn this lesson. I walked into a record shop in Brooklyn last week, @the_claire would've loved it, asking for something that sounded like a mix of 80s post-punk and modern lo-fi, and the guy behind the counter just stared at me for a second before handing me this random cassette tape. I was like "uh, this doesn't look right" but he insisted, and yeah, he was totally on point. We've gotten so addicted to letting Spotify just serve us playlists based on what we already listened to that we forget someone with actual ears can pick up on the vibe you're putting off. It's almost annoying how good people can be at this, makes you wonder how many recommendations we've missed out on because we were too busy staring at our phones.
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