Good thoughts, writing, and projects from the readers of this newsletter

It's not easy to be confident in a body of knowledge that has phantom limbs

A five-year, $5 million grant to HathiTrust, with the Northeastern University Library and Authors Alliance as partners, will create responsible, equitable, and transparent services that leverage AI for the public good and scholarly discovery

It's not easy being green when there's little research on the energy consumption of specific AI tasks

The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text

Like nineteenth-century scholars who wrote about the world without deeply engaging with it, academics who lean too heavily on AI risk becoming paper-thin

Advice I will not give, and books I have not written

How libraries could create a thoughtful and ethical interface between their shelves and artificial intelligence

An old book puts today's new technology in perspective

An old book puts today's new technology in perspective

Despite its unserious name, vibe coding shows promise for elements of serious scholarly work

Sometimes you need the fake to show you what's real

Sometimes you need the fake to show you what's real

Not with chatbots as we know them, but perhaps with what comes next

Between the poles of Zero AI and AI For Everything lies a vast, poorly mapped middle ground

A shocking photograph featured a brave man — and visual echoes of the art he loved

AI companies need to focus on limits, not limitless possibilities, to get the public on board

One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved

Converting ambiguity into precision can help a broader audience discover and learn from collections

An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward

Discover the latest work from across the field and around the world

Creators should demand credit, not just compensation.

The remuneration from Bartz v. Anthropic may not provide what writers really want: respect, recognition, and readers

The remuneration from Bartz v. Anthropic may not provide what writers really want: respect, recognition, and readers

The remuneration from Bartz v. Anthropic may not provide what writers really want: respect, recognition, and readers

A new framework provides a way for cultural heritage institutions to take advantage of the technology with fewer misgivings, and to serve students, scholars, and the public better

The tests we are using to assess the intelligence of AI are missing an essential aspect of human inquiry — the query itself

A Mellon-funded project to develop an ethical, public-interest way to incorporate books into artificial intelligence