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Peak Text: AI and the Golden Age of Libraries and Archives by Keir Winesmith
- Finished “EGOT of GLAMs” with latest job
- Mapping Brisbane
- 1957 Tram network: based on older tracks, evolved into suburbs. River is fixed
- Averaged with AI = River + Tramlines
- Maps of Queensland
- Merged many maps of Queensland with Model that knows birds.
- NFSA (National Film and Sound Archive), Machine Learning and AI
- Pilot to have AI transcribe etc material in the archive
- Internal Transparency
- Principals of NFSA AI project
- Maintain Trust – Train only on stuff they have copyright
- Build effectively and Transparently
- Create Public Value
- AI = Archival Intelligence
- or maybe “Average Inputs”
- Stereograms created by AI
- Defaults to the small subset that is online
- Previously was 1900 colonial pictures
- Now still colonial but Google products a Sanfran street scene
- The perfect Training Data is what archives have been putting out for years with lots of metadata
- OpenAi Whisper trained on lots of youtube videos it turns mumbles into “Like and subscribe” and music fade outs turn into “Than you for watching”
- The new golden age
- Previous Golden Age was films explosion between the wars
- 1980s and 1990s of Video games
- Australian stories are no longer being made on celleloid and now being on social media
- Thinks as boomers die off Facebook is dying off.
- Other platforms my die in the next few years
- New sites just algorithmically created content, not stuff shared by friends etc
- What does NFSA do in response to how things change
- Ability to search transcripts mean they can find people taking about something or someone, not just titles
- Mass Transcript + Graph. References to cultural things like movies, quotes in unrelated documents.
- Transcribed 18.7 years of content
- Hope to open up more later in 2026
- But don’t forget openness got us in this mess in the first place
- Need to think before publishing stuff, since now it will be ingested by everyone
