ai & crowdsourcing

At the Society of American Archivists conference last August, I joined a panel on artificial intelligence. The first question from the audience came quickly and, frankly, with a little heat: "How do you justify using energy-intensive tools like AI when the climate crisis is only getting worse?" That moment stuck with me. The archivists in the room were being conscientious—a … [Read more...] about Environmental Impact of AI

Yesterday we deployed two new features to help you evaluate Gemini 3 (and eventually others) results against human transcribed or corrected text. First, we’ve developed a comparison screen that shows the differences between an AI generated page transcription and human created ground truth: Next, we calculate statistics, again comparing the AI draft against the human … [Read more...] about How Do You Know Whether AI Is "Good Enough"?

When Ben sent me Mark Humphries’ report on testing a new, unreleased Gemini model, I got scared. And excited. Mark is a historian and digital humanist who’s gone deep on analyzing AI tools for textual transcription. He understands the dangers of “seductive plausibility” in LLM outputs. He knows what researchers and historians need from archival text. He measures errors … [Read more...] about Introducing Gemini 3.0 Support in FromThePage

Last month, Denyse Allen asked this question on the Genealogy and AI Facebook group:If volunteers use AI to transcribe documents, is that OK? I have strong opinions, but want to explain them. First off, the institutions running big crowdsourcing projects have staff who can automate sending all of their documents to AI engines for transcription. As a software developer, … [Read more...] about Is That Transcription Really Human?