A third of recent websites now contain AI-generated text; Google is increasingly making AI summaries the default mode of knowledge retrieval; and third parties are creating “sloppelgangers” of artists’ web pages with AI. What might this trend mean for cultural heritage, and what should we do about it?
What You Think It Means Read More »
This week we lost a figure known as “the dean of American avant-garde film.” Ken Jacobs was renowned for his ability to turn the humblest materia prima of cinema, including 16mm projectors and dusty reels of found footage, into optical sorcery. In so doing, he also turned time-honored assumptions about media preservation on their head.
Ken Jacobs and Preserving the Immaterial Read More »
When he died last Wednesday, artist Mel Bochner left a body of work that’s gained in relevance in a half century defined by information—even more so in the age of AI. The artist’s death holds special meaning for me because he was a mentor when I was in graduate school at the Yale School of
Mel Bochner and the bridge from words to worlds Read More »
Most of us know by now that generative AI can promote stereotypes based on biased data. Yet even when the training data is saturated with perfectly accurate representations—and little to no inaccurate ones—the results can still be biased. Why is this so?
AI, Old Masters, and the Geometry of Misinformation Read More »
AI advocates have expressed frustration at Ted Chiang’s critique of AI in The New Yorker, where he argued that large language models “take an average of the choices that other writers have made.” Yes it’s a simplification, but it’s also correct at a fundamental level.
Why your AI outputs feel “average” Read More »
Join UMaine Digital Curation for a conversation with Christiane Paul, a trailblazer in the field who will review how practices of creating, collecting, and exhibiting have transformed in response to the latest tech trends, particularly the rise of generative AI.
Digital Curation in the Shadow of AI Read More »
Text generators like ChatGPT have dominated my conversations with educators about AI in the past year. Despite their emergence a year before chatbots, text-to-image generators like DALL-E or Midjourney typically come up only in generic conversations about plagiarism or bias. This is understandable, both because writing has been central to so many disciplines and because
Why you should generate AI images in your classroom Read More »
This fall an unusual four-month experiment pitted generative AI against conventional digital tools in eight separate creative tasks. Fifty students wrote, coded, designed, modeled, and recorded creations with and without AI, then judged the results.
AI versus old-school creativity: a 50-student, semester-long showdown Read More »
As part of its Learning With AI initiative, UMaine’s New Media program continues to offer free webinars on ways generative AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney are disrupting today’s workplaces and workflows. These online discussions feature New Media faculty and alumni reporting from the front lines of fields such as business, digital art, web development, video
Webinars examine impact of AI on coders and creators Read More »
NFTs hold out the promise of democratizing art by letting digital creators sell their works directly to collectors. But does the reality hold up to the hype?
NFTs: the promises and perils of crypto-art Read More »
