The question is no longer simply: *“Should information professionals use AI?”*
A more difficult question is: *“Can information professionals afford not to understand AI?”*
I recently read Marydee Ojala’s article, *“To AI or not to AI: Do information professionals really have a choice?”* It raises an issue that deserves more attention in India too.
For libraries, documentation centres, archives and information services, AI is already entering the spaces where people search, learn, write and make decisions.
But I don’t think the answer is to blindly adopt every new AI tool.
Nor is completely avoiding AI a realistic long-term strategy.
The Indian context makes this discussion even more interesting.
We work across enormous differences in language, digital literacy, access, institutional capacity and economic background. A researcher in a well-funded university and a student using a low-cost smartphone in a smaller town may experience AI very differently.
That is where information professionals have an important responsibility.
We need to teach people not only *how to use AI*, but also:
• How to question an AI-generated answer • How to verify sources and citations • How to recognise fabricated information • What personal or institutional data should not be shared • When a traditional database, catalogue or primary source is still the better choice • How to distinguish assistance from dependence
There is another issue we should discuss more openly: *language*.
India is not an English-only information environment. If AI is going to become part of information services, multilingual access, local knowledge and the quality of Indian-language outputs cannot be treated as secondary concerns.
For me, the role of the information professional is therefore not disappearing.
It is changing.
The librarian, information scientist or knowledge professional may increasingly become the person who helps others navigate the space *between information and generated information*.
That requires technical familiarity, certainly.
But it also requires something AI cannot simply provide on its own: professional judgement.
Perhaps the choice before us is not really *AI or no AI*.
It is whether we will participate thoughtfully in shaping how AI is used in our information institutions — or leave those decisions entirely to technology vendors, management teams and algorithms.
That is a conversation Indian libraries and information professionals need to have now, not five years from now.
*The technology will keep changing. Our responsibility to help people find, question and understand information should not.*
Source: Marydee Ojala, Information Today Europe — “To AI or not to AI: Do information professionals really have a choice?” www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/To-AI-or-not-to-AI-Do-information-professionals-really-have-a-choice-176864.aspx