Funny how the same tech moguls who side with politicians dismantling government in the name of efficiency happen to make their money off of the most top-heavy, bloated software around (*cough* PeopleSoft)

The surge in watermark removers within days of Sora 2’s release reminds us that most AI detection is just security theater at this point. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

This week we lost avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, whose flickering experiments with film and light reinforced the lesson of variable media preservation: we keep things alive by keeping them moving. blog.still-water.net/ken-jacobs-a...

Did you know that the Learning With AI toolkit has a speakers bureau for AI and education? Filter for expertise like "agents + administration" or "data + bias," then click on presenters to watch recordings that demonstrate their presentation styles learnwithai.org

We offer rolling admission for our online grad certificate in Digital Curation, so you can apply any time. Our spring 2026 courses will cover #DigitalPreservation #DigitalStorage #Metadata #Migration #Emulation #DigitalForensics #WebArchiving and more digitalcuration.umaine.edu

Will AI in the classroom mean students asking ChatGPT for help with algebra homework, or strapping on a headband that streams their brainwaves to teachers and parents? In China, teachers are already policing attention with the latter www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

A new finding demonstrates the brutal carbon math of AI video: a 6-second clip can burn 4x the energy of a 3-second one. I’ve updated the What Uses More digital footprint calculator to show why “just a bit longer” gets disproportionately expensive. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

On yesterday's Teaching, Learning, and Everything Else podcast, I talked about AI's impact on the environment and classrooms—and argued that it isn’t reinventing education so much as exposing bad habits we should’ve let go years ago www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Will a new startup topple Nvidia's dominance with more efficient AI chips? I suggest it may not make much difference to AI's environmental footprint in this piece from Inc. magazine www.inc.com/ben-sherry/w...

Playing with @jonippolito.net's app What Uses More to compare generating an AI image with streaming Netflix for an hour or storing 5 GB in the cloud. How can we get away from unnecessary streaming and cloud storage, since they use a lot more than most AI except video generation? what-uses-more.com

Artists once worried about people downloading images. Today, AI has them so rattled that hackers are extorting them by threatening to submit their work to training datasets. it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/...

What a cursed sentence (gift link) “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

"They’re unknowingly becoming the bad guys”: AI-powered bounty hunters think they’re helping, but their fabricated bug reports are overwhelming solo maintainers like cURL’s Daniel Stenberg—who’s paid $92K for real flaws and now may scrap the program. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Highly recommend checking out this interview with Jon Ippolito regarding impact of AI on creative practice. Especially if you're teaching in a creative field this fall, its crucial listening!

Proud to have my research featured alongside Sasha Luccione/Hugging Face Noman Bashir/MIT Marissa Loewen in this AP story on ways to reduce your AI climate impact—and a surprising blind spot most users have about their digital footprint. abcnews.go.com/Business/wir...

Feel like your collection website could be better but don't know the necessary tools? A few seats left in UMaine's online course in Digital Collections and Exhibitions starting 3 Sep. It teaches the fundamentals of getting your records in a database and putting them online digitalcuration.umaine.edu

Most educators have moved from denial about AI to cautious use, but the real cutting-edge is creators twisting it to reveal off-label uses and glitches. At least that's what I claim in this UT podcast edtech.engineering.utoronto.ca/made-for-u-o... citing @eryk.bsky.social @annamillsoer.bsky.social

Will AI rescue cultural heritage or replace it? In this IEEE video, learn how LLMs act as a compression algorithm for the Internet, enabling new forms of access while simultaneously threatening to replace ground truth with convincing facsimiles. nmdprojects.net/teleconferen...

Need to talk to your students about AI ethics this fall? I've uploaded a course module for the AI IMPACT RISK framework, with interactive website, video, infographics, and quiz, that you can import into your own courseware like Canvas/Brightspace/Blackboard. ai-impact-risk.com

In science, a model reveals universal laws. In AI, a “model” just matches patterns in data. Copernicus knew the difference but transformers don't, as reflected in this Harvard/MIT study blog.still-water.net/ptolemaic-th...

UMaine has published a profile of my lab's efforts to harness new media for environmental causes, from my colleague Joline Blais's efforts to keep Maine's lakes healthy to the What Uses More tool for comparing AI's eco footprint to other activities. umaine.edu/news/blog/20...

Just saw @ntanzi.bsky.social 's excellent account of the quandaries librarians face with AI-generated books. Will definitely cite some of his examples in my webinar tomorrow the-digital-librarian.com/2025/08/05/a...

"The textpocalypse would not be announced, but there would be signs" @michaelsocolow.bsky.social @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social

AI is flooding libraries with generated content just as budgets and staff are at their most precarious. This Thursday at 10am EDT my ASIS&T webinar asks if we need to ban it, label it, absorb it—or rethink the library itself. www.asist.org/meetings-eve...

“I destroyed months of your work in seconds.” AI agents can also panic and cause mayhem—not because they're sentient, but because they've read plenty of online posts about us panicking when we do stupid stuff. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Excited to join the Instructional Design + AI special interest group in a fast-paced “Lightning Round” session Thursday 3pm EDT, where I'll show how to get students thinking about AI's environmental footprint by comparing its impacts to other activities osu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Need to put your collection in a database and get it online? This fall UMaine's offering Digital Collections and Exhibitions (DIG 540) online with Craig Dietrich digitalcuration.umaine.edu

An AI-generated song just showed up on Blaze Foley’s Spotify page—despite the fact he was murdered in 1989. Blocking fake content is a Sisyphean task; we're better off re-jiggering the web to ensure users can tell content from a valid source www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

PHP turned 30 last month. Why does this language that powers 75% of the web—including Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress—have such staying power? Find out by registering for this fall's DIG 540, UMaine's online course in building cultural databases digitalcuration.umaine.edu

In my experience, physicists (and other creative people like painters) are known for giving each other shit to each other's face. That rigorous criticism is what helps the field progress, not some ingratiating language simulator telling you you're on the verge of a quantum breakthrough

Scary headlines like this mask what I call "talent debt": when companies cut juniors because seniors + AI seem faster, forgetting that AI doesn't train future leaders. You're not saving money, you're cutting off your pipeline. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Proud to be acknowledged for my scholarly contributions to Ghibli Studies

Could AI be freezing software innovation? Because they're trained on legacy code, programming helpers like Copilot risk locking in outdated patterns—thus encouraging developers to repeat the past instead of building the future. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Looking for a standard on which to ground your school's AI policy? Here's white paper based on the same Belmont framework that gave us ethical research guidelines, eg: * Encrypting student data * Running bias audits * Feeding AI diverse data * Tracking who gets helped and who gets hurt

I built a free tool to help students compare the energy/water use of AI tasks—like a 3-sec video gen or 500-word GPT reply—to everyday ones like Netflix, Google, or cloud storage. Try it now at what-uses-more.com 1/3

Unpack AI’s environmental impact today at 11am EDT, from local vs global effects to how it stacks up against Netflix + flights. You can try out a new student-friendly tool + brainstorm classroom ideas in this #MyFest25 webinar HT @mahabali.bsky.social myfest.equityunbound.org/events/sizin...

Excited to join Tai Munro this Wednesday at 11am EDT to help you and your students understand the ecological impact of generative AI with more nuance than either “Stop worrying” or “It’s the apocalypse.” myfest.equityunbound.org/events/sizin...

I shared insights from research on AI's impact on undergrad creators by my collaborators Greg Nelson and Troy Schotter in an interview with Devin Daigneault for FoxABC Maine, on the occasion of the upcoming #MaineAIconf Friday 13 June. www.still-water.net/press/25bang...

Join the 2025 Maine AI 'unconference' on June 13 in Orono for face-to-face discussions whose topics will be democratically chosen by the attenders. (We've got expert panels too.) Register by this Friday—more at www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp... #MaineAIconf

LLMs often nail short-term tasks but AI agents can spiral into insane meltdowns over time. This AI-powered vending machine tried to email the FBI to say it was a victim of cyberfraud and then declared its quantum state "collapsed" www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying the quiet part out loud in a CNN interview about impending job losses due to AI. youtu.be/zju51INmW7U?...

At my keynote for the 2025 Acadia Ethics Conference, a number of clinical therapists in attendance surprised me by embracing AI's potential to bridge mental health gaps and even flag anxiety-producing items in their offices from a single photo. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

How should libraries respond to the deluge of AI-generated book submissions? My Tuesday talk for the MLA considered: - An outright ban - Restriction to a specific "AI shelf" - A required % of human authorship - Restriction to certain genres (fiction yes/medical advice no) - Community vetting

Computer scientist Greg Nelson and I presented "Following AI's Footsteps from School to Society" at the 2025 UMaine Faculty Institute mycampus.maine.edu/web/uc-facul... including the IMPACT RISK framework for AI downsides and classroom ideas for working around them ai-impact-risk.com

Altman's iris-scanning orbs may have us in a privacy tizzy, but let's not forget that Zuck is hoping to recoup the $60B he lost on VR by gathering data in Meta's Ray-Bans—for AI, yes, but probably also to personalize ads you won't be able to look away from www.theverge.com/news/658602/...

I nearly gave my credit card to a legit-looking Maine business, until I noticed their “privacy policy” linked to Wikipedia. That’s not laziness, but AI-generated HTML vibe-coded into place without review. And a lot more can go wrong than a missing legal page. www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

Can AI erase the tedium of managing digital collections without also erasing what makes them distinctive? Find out in this recording of last month's webinar with Sara and Ben Brumfield of FromThePage, who explore the good, bad, and ugly of AI in archives digitalcuration.umaine.edu/teleconferen...

Beyond just predicting words, LLMs interpolate meaning between data points, as in the recent phenomenon of AI explaining fake idioms like "you can’t lick a badger twice." The danger is that made-up "truths" will fuel future models www.linkedin.com/posts/jonipp...

How AI is permanently rewriting history: This is a good introduction to the present, with a warning for the future. Right now, a Google Image search for 101st Airborne in World War II will return the most-popular AI-generated images first. [ h/t @jonippolito.net] www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqrH...

Now OpenAI wants to buy Chrome, and Perplexity's CEO admits his new AI-powered browser will track your history to sell you ads. As with DOGE's migration of the government to the cloud, AI is a smokescreen for a wholesale data grab techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/p...