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 »
Are we building data centers for AI—or something else? Data from the industry suggests a more insidious motive.
What if data centers aren’t about AI? Read More »
Last December the town of Lewiston, Maine, pushed back on a proposed data center with some help from New Media faculty informed enough to cut through the hype. Still Water co-director Joline Blais was the guest for the December 24th episode of the WTBA podcast, “The Trojan Horse of AI: Data Centers and Community Impact.”
A small victory over big data Read More »
Of all the AI buzzwords out there, the word “model” would seem free of hyperbole compared to “superintelligent” or the “singularity.” Yet this innocuous-seeming word can mean two contradictory things, and AI companies are deliberately muddling the line between them. A recent Harvard/MIT study of simulating planetary orbits illustrates the contrast between what scientists consider
Ptolemaic Thinking in the Age of AI Read More »
How many AI videos equal watching a Netflix movie? A tool launched last week by the Still Water lab lets students compare the hidden costs of digital habits across both AI and non-AI activities.
New app helps students compare the environmental cost of AI and everyday tech Read More »
This April’s teleconference from UMaine’s Digital Curation program looks at the practical and ethical issues of integrating AI into archival workflows—and how human crowdsourcing can fill in the gaps.
Should you let AI manage your collection? 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 »
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 »
