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.
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 …
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.
A new tool hopes to drive more students to the polls, and it uses AI under the hood to help.
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.
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.
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.
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.
