The Authors Guild (USA) launched its Human Authored Certification program (29 January 2025). This certification permits its members to register their written works with the Guild as having been created by a human rather than something produced by artificial intelligence (AI). These are some first thoughts I had when reading about the program and reflecting on initiatives with similar goals.
Continue reading “Getting Certainty on Human Versus Synthetic Media”Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us
The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc. as tools to be used for examining human cultures, behaviours, and society.
Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us”Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?
I’ve been thinking about something like an instance Community Pledge becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don’t mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated what their administrative commitments to their community are. Perhaps because until recently things have been on a smaller scale & practices are maturing.
Here is what I’ve been considering. It’s a thought process but not at all, thought-out. There are problems but I’d like to put the idea out there in case others have worried about this and perhaps, something can come of it. This is written in 500 character paragraphs because I was originally going to thread it in Mastodon but it got too long.
Continue reading “Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?”Mastodon Social Media Instances of Interest
The Mastodon social networks have attracted a lot more attention recently. I posted on concepts behind Mastodon, ActivityPub, and this federated style of social media a few years ago. To help anyone that is thinking of trying out Mastodon, the rest of this post highlights some Mastodon communities (instances) that are worth your while to look into. There is also a very good quick start guide, which although written with humanities scholars in mind, is largely applicable to anyone.
Finally, see this great page of academic Mastodon groups, user lists by discipline, and communities/instances. You can also try this Find Academics on Mastodon site for discovering accounts.
Continue reading “Mastodon Social Media Instances of Interest”Companies Can’t Just Put Surveillance Tech into Libraries
There’s a good read about a few oligopolistic publishers that proposed unethical surveillance technologies for academic libraries. I thought that the original article, while addressing a lot and from a variety of people, was missing some perspective from librarians on the subject. I wrote some points about this third-party potential for breaching confidentiality in a library and an ethical approach from librarians on my other blog.
Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft
I’ve been reading the draft consultation version of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy (PDF). The strategy proposes strengthening content, ensuring its preservation, and maximizing its access and use. These are important for many reasons the report addresses regarding culture; the report also has some anchors in industry, stating that “nations that nurture their digital information assets and infrastructure will prosper.” Continue reading “Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft”