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 »
What happens to ground truth when finding a factoid or photo no longer means consulting an archive but generating one from scratch? That’s the question that drives “Honey, AI Shrunk the Archive,” an essay I wrote for the forthcoming anthology New Directions in Digital Textual Studies.
AI as miniature archive Read More »
Diversity without cacophony Group discussions on controversial subjects can open students to more viewpoints, but they can also result in the usual suspects—sometimes the most thoughtful students, but often just the loudmouths—dominating the conversation. So I was intrigued when Greg Nelson and Rotem Landesman, my collaborators on a course that examines in-depth the impact of
Pooling ideas for an AI ethics policy Read More »
When a tech reporter for the NY Times outsourced her decisions for a week to ChatGPT, she complained that “AI made me basic.” But it turns out the math behind generative AI can lead to results that are blandly average or wildly inaccurate.
“AI made me basic” Read More »
A new tool hopes to drive more students to the polls, and it uses AI under the hood to help.
Can AI help democracy? This app hopes it can 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 »
Deep-faked images and other media may get all the headlines when it comes to endangering democracy, but the 2024 Maine Town Meeting revealed that the rise of generative AI arms saboteurs with many more insidious ways to destabilize elections.
AI’s threat to elections is not what you think Read More »
We should be genuinely worried about the hubris of the captains of AI.
The Misapplication of AI 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 »
