Information Research

Vol. 29 No. 1 2024

Editorial

Since we last published (in the middle of December), generative AI continues to make the headlines, particularly with Google’s attempts to satisfy the demands for “diversity”, by generating images of black, female Nazi soldiers. Needless to say, embarrassment all round. The feeling is, I suppose, that if the system can be trained to get things so wrong with images, what might be going on with text? Certainly biases must exist there, given the amount of training material that is used in these systems, and the fact that, as all of it is on the Web, all of the conspiracy materials that is out there is probably contributing. Certainly, the systems get information about people wrong, simply because so many people have the same names. There are, for example, lots with the name Tom Wilson, or even T.D. Wilson, and when I asked for a biography of myself, one of the systems told me I was dead! Another said that I had worked in places I’d never even visited. No doubt training will become more and more sophisticated over time, as the flaws and biases are discovered, but given AI’s ability to invent, on the basis of what it has learnt, I’ll be very cautious in using it for the foreseeable future.

In this issue we have quite a diversity of topics, and, appropriately, given the Introduction, one paper deals with “Who is using ChatGPT and why?”. Sangwon Lee and colleagues have applied an extended version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, to answer this question. They find that emotional responses to the technology also have a significant effect on the intention to adopt generative AI, in addition to the original factors of the model.

We have two papers in the information seeking/searching area: Gerd Berget explores information search from the perspective of “situated abilities”, which acknowledges the fact that information seekers with disabilities will rarely have the abilities assumed by information retrieval system designers. The other paper is by the aforesaid Tom Wilson and deals with the fact that “information-seeking behaviour” was a concept applied in psychological research, some 20 years before he introduced it to information science.

The remaining papers are a diverse set, dealing with inter-university collaborative networks, archivists views on user participation in their craft, open access training for doctoral students, and how people manage their personal electronic records systems. The last demonstrates that the more sophisticated the person’s approach to the problems, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their work.

We also have the usual set of book reviews, which I’m sure offers something for almost everyone.

My thanks to the referees who find the time to review papers for the journal, our Regional Editors, who cope with the problems of actually getting the reviews, our copy-editors, and our production team in Borås, who put it all together.

Tom Wilson
Editor in Chief