Member aspirit(they/their/them)

"Where did your catalog go?"

After being an active regular here for a few years, I decided to pull away from LibraryThing. In 2023, I removed thousands of my titles, many unique on the site, out of concern for how the data is being used.

Why...?

A website integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT amidst the legal and ethical debates about the chatbot, the company behind it, and the goals of its developers is not a good look. I feel that's especially bad on a site relied on by librarians whose jobs were made more difficult (or dangerous!) by the misinformation coming out of ChatGPT, which was probably trained off of Talk scraped without notice to LT members.

Update: The AI search has been removed for now.

There's too much aggressive homophobia, queermisia, and racism allowed on LibraryThing. I would push back when I had the time, but it's disheartening when it comes from the people who must be trusted for the site to be a safe place to share knowledge. There's already too much hate coming after libraries, booksellers, publishers, and authors. Why should we deal with it here? Eventually, I no longer had to energy to continue using the site every day(/week).