An institution recently emailed and asked: “Are you doing some AI experiment on my collection without telling me? I see this one transcriber who really feels like they are using AI.” I started typing a standard response: Of course we’re not testing AI on your collection without telling you. Have you checked the suspicious behaviors dashboard? Have you considered turning … [Read more...] about We Thought This Transcriber Was a Bot
ai & crowdsourcing
The AI Encyclical and the Question of Efficiency: When "Easier" isn't "Better"
Last week, I was corresponding with my friend Laura Morreale about the results of Gemini transcription on this Crusader-era manuscript. The differences between the AI results and Laura’s are fairly interesting: there are some mis-readings, like y for ii, but about half of the differences are reasonable editorial decisions. Gemini represents long s as the character ſ and retains … [Read more...] about The AI Encyclical and the Question of Efficiency: When "Easier" isn't "Better"
Making AI Energy Use More Transparent
We recently hosted a webinar by our friend Jon Ippolito from the University of Maine's New Media program. We'd been looking for resources on how to evaluate and judge energy usage by LLMs since last summer's SAA panel questions started with a pointed "question" on the ethical use of AI, given the energy consumption. Jon has done the most on gathering and evaluating the … [Read more...] about Making AI Energy Use More Transparent
AI With Historical Instincts?
Ben recently made the following observations on BlueSky, and we thought they were interesting enough to share with all of you: I stumbled across something interesting during a live demo in yesterday's webinar. Not having anything prepared, I tried a page in the Queens University Archives' Riel Resistance Collection. The hand was extraordinarily difficult for … [Read more...] about AI With Historical Instincts?
How Good HTR is Changing What & How We’re Transcribing
In a recent discussion on BlueSky, Ben and Scott Weingart (and others) had a conversation about the explosion of possibilities that might come from good, cheap, AI transcription. Scott asks “how the bias of the spotlight of what’s searchable will reshape how people will engage with the past. That is, how will history be remembered and written in new ways, and privileging what … [Read more...] about How Good HTR is Changing What & How We’re Transcribing