Doctor AI, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Free Market

Posted by Margot M on June 3rd, 2026 Posted in: Communities of Interest
Tags: artificial intelligence, hospital librarians, hospital library advisory group

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This is part of a series of blog posts from hospital librarians using AI in their work. This post was submitted by Beth Merkle, Lead Librarian for Acquisitions & Collections at University of Rochester Medicine (NY).

A viral meme circulated on social media in Spring 2020, as bizarrely named apps and online platforms such as Kahoot, Canvas, and School Tool became the only way school happened during the pandemic:

The utterly bewildered Mark Wahlburg in the meme could be medical librarians today, with vendors and marketers and corporate gurus telling us:

• The future of patient care is CorpusMagk!
• Streamline your research with ComplexitrrPRO!
• Make your ERM work smarter with LabGabber 4.0!

A volley of AI-enhanced platforms, agents, bots, wizards, and assistants are being launched onto the market. Before the dust settles in your inbox another notification appears, touting yet another new app. There is no way to keep up with it all, but we – librarians and medical practitioners alike – feel the pressure that we must and we should.

Zhang-Ren Chen writes in “AI FOMO: everyone is mastering AI except me — or are they?” about his shift away from anxiety in thinking about the myriad “breathless product launches” that fill his inbox to a more circumspect view:

Trying to keep up while an underlying technology is shifting so rapidly is often wasted effort. The most effective users I know — colleagues in bioinformatics who use AI daily and collaborators at AI labs who build these systems — are not always the first to try everything. More often, they are the ones who wait just long enough for the signal to separate from the noise: for real use cases to emerge, failure modes to become visible and the community to converge on what works.

In essence, to stay on top of AI you can stop trying to stay on top of AI. Detached observation is the best strategy while we wait for the AI Bubble to burst. Most of the products you hear about today won’t be here in six months – the competitive market and rapidly advancing innovations will weed them out.

Here are some newsletters and podcasts that can help you keep half an eye on AI while letting the frantic noise slip by mostly unnoticed. I put them in four buckets that feel relevant to what librarians should be observing and considering in AI: Industry, Ethics, Culture, and Medicine. These have all helped me transition from a gloom-and-doom AI skeptic to a cool, calm, and collected AI skeptic. Here’s how to use them:

1. You can sign up for daily or weekly email newsletters and add podcasts to your feed. As the notifications come in or at a designated time during your weekly routine, scan the titles and summaries to get a sense of the big picture.
2. Read or listen to what interests you or seems relevant and delete the rest. If you open a bunch of browser tabs with the intent to read them later but don’t get to them in a few days, close them and move on with your life. There will be more notifications tomorrow.
3. You can bookmark the sites in a folder that you check in one once a week. Click on each page, read or listen to the articles or episodes that speak to you, ignore the rest, and move on with your life.

Industry

What happens to our subscriptions to journals and databases with AI in the picture? How will licensing change? How will searching and discovery change?

Artificial Intelligence Archives – The Scholarly Kitchen

The Scholarly Kitchen is the official blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing with the tagline “What’s Hot and Cooking in Scholarly Publishing.”

Aaron Tay’s Musings about Librarianship | Substack

Tay is an academic librarian from Singapore who writes about AI-powered search tools through a librarianship lens on Substack.

Ethics

What happens to the scientific research that medical professionals rely on to make clinical decisions, write policy, or identify best practices?

Retraction Watch – Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process

I think of Retraction Watch as TMZ for scholarly gossip: scientific integrity, article retractions, predatory journals, and AI’s effect on the academic publishing community.

404 Media

If Retraction Watch is the TMZ for what happens when AI is mixed into the $29 billion plus academic publishing industry, 404 Media is the Black Mirror for AI let loose in every industry and every facet of people’s lives.

Culture

What’s going on with AI and what does it mean for our day-to-day lives?

Hard Fork – The New York Times

Hard Fork from the New York Times explores technology in the news and culture broadly. AI is covered frequently, and in many contexts.

Offline with Jon Favreau | Crooked Media

Crooked Media, a progressive, independent media company, produces a suite of political podcasts. Offline offers a break from online political discourse with “deeper conversations about the impact of technology and the internet on our politics and culture.”

Medicine

How are clinicians, students, and researchers using and thinking about AI?

NEJM AI Grand Rounds | NEJM Group

The New England Journal of Medicine produces this AI Grand Rounds podcast about “how AI will change clinical practice and healthcare, how it will impact the patient experience, and about the people who are pushing for innovation.”

Podcast | JAMA+ AI | JAMA Network

The Journal of the American Medical Association’s AI Conversations podcast features “interviews exploring how AI is impacting medicine, from the clinic to the lab to the classroom.”

Closing Thoughts

Elvis sang, “only fools rush in.” Aaron Burr sings in Hamilton, “I’m not falling behind I am lying in wait.” The AI landscape is changing so quickly that the best move is observation, measured experimentation, and patience.