Thinking about the ethical care of information, knowledge, culture, and what we do for societies over a very long time.

Joshua Chalifour

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.

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

Open data is a well-defined concept but in the public sector, there is some difficult work ahead for its digital curation. Although the support and production of open data from governments around the world varies (with many not yet supporting it at all) there are clear movements to encourage and grow open government data initiatives.

Digital Curation Issues Involving Open Government Data

Recent copyright legislation prevents archives from legitimately fulfilling key requirements for the long term preservation and provision of access to digital fonds.

How Recent Copyright Legislation (C-11) and TPMs Prevent Digital Preservation

This is the second part in a series of three posts.

Part 1 — The TPM Environment and Copyright Change from C-11

 Part 2 — Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

Part 3 — Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal Download the whole document (PDF). Archives face inexorable problems with the duty to preserve massive quantities of information, stored on frail digital media.

Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

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.

Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?

A common way to model the relationships of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom is the DIKW pyramid. Starting with its base, each concept builds on top of the former. The gist is that we require data to form information † we use information to gain knowledge † and we use knowledge toward developing wisdom. This model is one doorway to understanding the relationship between these concepts.

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Our Pragmatic Ignorance

This morning, upon learning of the newly negotiated NAFTA or as it seems to be called now USMCA, I sent the following letter to ministers of the current Canadian government. I appreciate the very difficult and complex work involved in negotiating the new version of NAFTA with the USA and Mexico.

Letter to Ministers Regarding the New NAFTA / USMCA &amp; “Intellectual Property”

Communia published its

 Public Domain Manifesto

. The manifesto identifies the public domain concept with respect to historical development and more urgently, its relevance to culture today. I think it makes an important statement, in terms of offering a level, common understanding that could be used widely across society, government, and business.

First Take on the Public Domain Manifesto

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.

Getting Certainty on Human Versus Synthetic Media

Gautama Mehta’s recent article “Proposal to install spyware in university libraries to protect copyrights shocks academics” is an important read.

Publishers Proposing Surveillance Tech on Libraries

I’d been concerned with what I had once called digital cultural amnesia. Though in reflecting on the word “amnesia” I no longer think it’s the best way to express the problem. Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, writes about the phenomenon in

 The Observer

. She takes the personal analogue and raises it to a national level.

Ephemera and the National Memory

This is the third part in a series of three posts.

Part 1 — The TPM Environment and Copyright Change from C-11 Part 2 — Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

 Part 3 — Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal

Download the whole document (PDF). The Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) identifies five categories of appraisal criteria.

Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal

Sometimes we see headlines in the news about a book being challenged at a library. People from different perspectives might see the content of the book or other aspects of it as threatening or inappropriate. Understanding these challenges and forming responses is essential to our work as librarians in advocating and supporting intellectual freedom. Now, the work to track this information will receive more coordinated support.

Tracking the Challenges Made to Canadian Library Books

The processes and supports within an institution can, I’ve noticed, demand a bit of effort to change. When we speak of

 open scholarship

or

 open science

, many aspects tie-in or lead out from those concepts, which makes the whole prospect of institutional change quite complex.

Institutional Change toward Open Scholarship and Open Science

I first read an e-book a few years ago when I decided to see how War and Peace felt on my phone. Engrossing. And probably no less so than it is on paper. Now I like both paper books and e-books but the spread of e-books is about more than just enjoying them or not.

E-books: New Experiences and Problems with Access

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;

Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft

As a librarian, I talk with other faculty and students about their academic work and the life-cycle of the research process. I’ve always stressed that open access is important for many reasons, including toward making research outputs available to people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to get them.

Talk about the Broad Value of Open Access

Chroknowlogy

The Authors Guild (USA) launched its [Human Authored
Certification](https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"} 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.

The Human Authored Certification program is an interesting and I believe
reasonable effort in response to the many generative AI works flooding
our world. Already there have been dangerous outcomes when people
acquire these AI-generated texts and rely on their content. For example,
books sold about mushroom identification that include false information
on toxicity, false research outputs, unreliable historical descriptions,
fabricated biographical details, and more are among the problems with
these easy-to-produce AI outputs. In addition to the potential harms of
AI-produced misinformation, critical issues regarding how we value the
unique quality of human creativity must be central to understanding the
cultural impact of AI. All of which is to say that if people cannot
distinguish works produced by AI when they acquire them, we lose a
critical ability to understand the work before us.

While I laud this effort from the Author's Guild and believe this is an
important start, I do not think it is enough. It has some problems,
which might become more visible if people rely too heavily on it. First,
it is a national program based in the USA, which is perfectly fine for
them but of course this is a global issue that requires efforts, ideally
coordinated and collaborated on by trusted institutions from around the
world.

To gain certification, an author must be a member of the Guild and
provide information about their work-to-be certified. The Guild then
provides a searchable database that people can access to verify works
for themselves. I hope that this database will permit open connectivity
and licence its content in an open way. I don't think that this system
could provide absolute certainty that the author hasn't generated their
work with AI but that's also probably not quite the goal. Perhaps that
would be an impossible task. At least the system can help people gain
confidence that a work they are engaging with was at a minimum claimed
to be written by a real human. That is something valuable but that is
something that I hope will be very visible too. I believe there is a
risk that people will overly-rely on this type of database as claiming
more than it possibly can verify.

The Author's Guild explains its boundaries around what is considered
AI-generated versus what is acceptable in its press release ([Authors
Guild Launches "Human Authored" Certification to Preserve Authenticity
in
Literature](https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-launches-human-authored-certification-to-preserve-authenticity-in-literature/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}) as:

> "The use of the Human Authored mark is restricted to books and other
> works where the text was written by humans, except for a de minimis
> amount of AI-generated text to accommodate uses of AI-powered grammar
> and spell-check applications and other minor AI use. Use of AI as a
> tool, other than to generate text, such as for research or
> brainstorming, does not disqualify a book, as long as the text was
> human written."

I interpret this purpose as not to bar the use of digital techniques but
rather to ensure some confidence in the primacy of the human-created
content.

From another angle, there are people working on systems to identify
works produced by AI (or not). For example there is the [Coalition for
Content Provenance and
Authenticity](https://c2pa.org/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} (C2PA) and the resulting [Content
Credentials](https://contentcredentials.org/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}. This open technical standard is an effort to help
people trace the history of a work of digital content. By examining its
provenance people can better determine whether a work was generated by
AI or not. This seems to be a valuable effort to pursue though not
without some risks. For example, I noted that it was initially begun by
Adobe and Microsoft and I think there is reason to fear the potential of
enabling large companies such as those to seize control over
verification and trust aspects of the digital ecosystem. If only digital
systems that include their support are able to provide assurance of this
kind of standard, it would focus what is considered acceptable in the
hands of a few powerful entities, potentially excluding broader means of
the commons. This note however is a brief commentary that requires
further, fair thought. Another consideration would be things like
Google's [SynthID](https://deepmind.google/technologies/synthid/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} that is designed to watermark AI-generated works in
imperceptible ways, which enable people to identify these works as
synthetic media. But this is also not perfect. Nothing forces bad-actors
to engage with these systems.

I've long felt that it is absolutely necessary that we have techniques
to verify and gain certainty about the sources of our creative,
informational, research, and other works whether they are in text or
other forms. In my opinion, memory institutions such as libraries,
archives, and museums are among the principal institutions suited to
take up this responsibility. Libraries have long been reliable sources
of verification for informational needs. Libraries devote significant
focus on systems of authority and ought to be central in developing new
techniques for demarking and verifying works produced by humans versus
those generated by digital tools such as AI. However, the new
initiatives we need in this domain from memory institutions are somewhat
nascent.

I hope to see, and perhaps participate in, a large coming-together of
skills from groups such as the Authors Guild, memory institutions,
journalism organizations, open technical groups, and more to coordinate
reliable approaches to the issue of ensuring trust in the fact that a
work is human-created.
