The AI Committee of the American Society for Indexing is pleased to announce the release of our white paper investigating the quality of LLM-generated book indexes, “LLM-Generated Book Indexes: Can They Replace Professionally Created Indexes?”
We are developing a Statement on AI based on the white paper, which will include guidance for authors, publishers, and indexers; the statement will be released soon.
Click here to download the white paper in full.
Read the abstract below.
Abstract
Book indexes allow readers to quickly access the information they seek. Necessary criteria for a book index include completeness (an index must guide the reader to all indexable information in the book), navigability (an index must guide the reader to subtopics and related topics), and accuracy (an index should not contain false or inaccurate information and should reflect the author’s terminology). We investigated whether artificial intelligence (AI) based on large language models (LLMs) is capable of providing indexes that meet these criteria and found those indexes fall far short. At this time, AI cannot replace professional book indexers and we are doubtful that it will be able to do so soon, or even at all.