Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Eastern Daylight Time)

Our goal is to advance our empirical understanding of the direct engagement of knowledge workers in academia with generative AI (Gen AI), as they are the thought leaders in our society. We interviewed 17 knowledge workers, including faculty and students, to investigate the social and technical dimensions of Gen AI from their perspective. Knowledge workers expressed worries about Gen AI undermining trust in the relationship between instructor and student and discussed potential solutions, such as pedagogy readiness, to mitigate them. Additionally, participants recognized Gen AI’s potential to democratize knowledge by accelerating the learning process and act as an accessible research assistant. However, there were also concerns about potential social and power imbalances stemming from unequal access to such technologies. Our study offers insights into the concerns and hopes of knowledge workers about the ethical use of Gen AI in educational settings and beyond, with implications for navigating this new landscape.

While there is increased interest in studying the information behavior of individuals engaged in creative pursuits, the body of research on the topic is still small in comparison to the volume of studies concerning the information behavior of scientists, social scientists, and humanists. Two possible and interrelated explanations for this are 1) non-artists’ misunderstanding artists’ need for information as a support and inspiration for their work; and 2) the difficulty inherent in studying the creative process, which is highly personal to the artist and often not visible to others. This short paper describes a model for data collection designed to mitigate these challenges; by shifting the preliminary data collection to the artists themselves, diary studies mitigate the challenges presented by attempting to study artists’ information behavior in the internal and non-linear processes of creation. The author designed a study to capture 21 poets’ impressions of the role of information in both inspiring and supporting their poetry writing. This paper describes the project design and execution, data collection, and next steps in the author’s data analysis process.