Libby & Artificial Intelligence

OverDrive is excited to launch our newest Libby feature: Inspire Me. This innovative experience is driven by machine learning. Specifically, the suggestions and recommendations are produced by large-language-model generative artificial intelligence.

Our aim is to integrate the possibilities of AI into the Libby app judiciously and responsibly.

Your privacy

When you use Inspire Me to find fiction or nonfiction, none of your details or activity are provided to the AI model.

When you use Inspire Me with one of your tags, a random selection of titles you have saved to that tag will be given to the AI to generate suggestions. It does not receive any other details about you or your device, and it does not know the name or the description of your tag. It just gets the titles.

See the Libby Privacy Statement for more information on how we safeguard your data in Libby.

Environmental impact

We’ve designed the Inspire Me feature to minimize its impact on the environment. All AI requests are efficiently cached, and shared across all users of each library. Tags are user-specific; accordingly we have established limits on the number of AI requests that can be generated daily from user tags.

We are monitoring the energy footprint of Inspire Me as it rolls out and gains adoption.

Mistakes and inappropriate responses

All LLM-based AI models are prone to making factual mistakes and expressing hidden biases.

OverDrive has limited this risk with Inspire Me through a series of deliberate design decisions. Prompts are not free-text or open-ended. We ask the AI models to produce creative work — dreaming up book ideas — rather than to make assertions of fact. Every AI response has to include a clear and verifiable association to specific content in your library’s catalog.

Respect for intellectual property

OverDrive does not provide the AI model with access to copyrighted material, such as the chapters of ebooks or the recordings of audiobooks. We respect the intellectual property rights of creators.

Artificial intelligence features in Libby do not generate or alter in any way the original creative content that we receive from suppliers.