Jon Ippolito

Professor of New Media and Director of Digital Curation,

University of Maine 

DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu

Will Generative AI rescue or replace culture?

Missing edges of Rembrandt painting The Night Watch (1642) restored by the Rijksmuseum using AI.

AI images generated by the Library of Virginia using the description of John Butler from the Fairfax County Register of Free Negroes, 1822-1841.

IMPACT RISK framework for understanding AI downsides

ai-impact-risk.com

What Uses More app compares impact of AI and non-AI tasks

What-Uses-More.com

🤖 AI as compression algorithm

JPEG compression

Compression algorithms already work as classifiers

Lessons from AI as compression algorithm

• Produces bland, uniform content
• Interpolates missing data
• Does not show gaps

How compression affects archival tasks

Sara and Ben Brumfield, FromThePage

Sara and Ben Brumfield

Ai Slop Killing Internet Bloomberg

Overt takeover

"Texpocalypse" (Matthew Kirschenbaum)

Jim Acosta Bluesky Ai Parkland Interview Bots

Covert takeover

Ai Privacy Terms Links Wikipedia Sr 2025 05

Cloudflare Users No Click Ai Search Chart

Image generation in place of search?

Leonardo.ai Realtime Generation

AI-generated artist websites

Replacing the entire Internet?

Websim.ai

AI-generated books

AI-generated books

Post-AI archival trajectory

"AI is an archive in reverse"—Eryk Salvaggio

Archival loop

⚒️ Industry Solutions

Labeling content

⚒️ Organizational Solutions

Which AI policies would work for your library?

• 🤗 Accept all AI-generated books
• 🏷️ Accept AI-generated books only if they are labeled as such
• 💌 Accept AI-generated books in certain genres
• Accept books with some AI generation
  • 📔 AI-generated cover art
  • 🖼 AI-generated illustrations
  • 📝 AI-generated text (what percent?)
• 🧐 Vet AI-generated submissions (by staff or community)
• 📚 Place AI-generated books in a separate section or digital shelf
• #️⃣ Limit the number of AI-generated books by a single author or publisher
• 🧧 Allow user flagging of books suspected to be AI-generated without disclosure
• ❌ Ban all AI-generated books
• Other...

AI 🤝 crowdsourcing

Crowdsource human volunteers to check the results of AI-generated solutions.