National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees

My partner is an archivist, they attend these sorts of conferences, and we've talked about this frequently. Archivists are at best apprehensive about AI, especially shoddily implemented versions like will almost certainly be the case here.

Accuracy is everything, and the way information in the archive is presented to visitors/researchers is paramount. Anything that moves that discussion around that presentation away from human beings into the realm of artificially generated pablum is going to be met with resistance.

Think of it like how /r/askhistorians on Reddit would rather let a question go unanswered for hours so a professional can provide a proper, sourced answer, than let some random user chime in with anything. That's putting an emphasis on accuracy and providing a completeness, rather than a rapid one.

>At the current rate, it will take until 2046 to completely transcribe this series with just humans!,” Lagundo’s presentation says. She said that an AI transcript of the dataset was 90 percent correct and that it intends to share these transcripts with the public in its official catalog in November or December.

What's the rush? Why would we settle on 90% accuracy today when we could do it right and get 100%? It's not like this is mission critical information. It's an archive. Take the time and do it right.

Moreover, why is this so important that we need to burn the energy from AI to do it?

many angles on this current news items -- one that is worth mentioning first, echoes what others have said here.. these professional archivists are the "most expert" at a certain task at a National scale! yet the words "expert archivist" plus black-box corporate run, remote software is on full display, very likely heading towards "doing the job" of these most trained people. And to add insult to injury, in a certain task the success rate of 90% is declared "good enough" when these are people with years of training to never, at all, perform at that low of a level.

Draw your own conclusions about the professionalism and goals of management, emboldened and empowered by "scale" ..

As a counterpoint however.. vast and rapidly expanding knowledgebase is a unique and pressing concern of the modern age. Even world-class, PhD laden and disciplined groups are not keeping up with ingestion and use of the amounts of data emerging. The cure adds to the ailment here, though.. AI itself in current incarnations produces mountains of gibberish or worse, half-truths and half- very plausible and confident nonsense.. This is an important story.

> The specific disclosure will say: “Accuracy: AI-generated summaries and results may not reflect the opinion of NARA and are not guaranteed to be accurate. Historical records often contain factual errors or offensive language, which ArchieAI may repeat or use.”

So they disclose that ArchieAI might repeat factual errors in the records, but don't bother mentioning that ArchieAI might make up fictional history?

> “Why is the Generative AI calling itself an ‘expert archivist?’” an employee asked. “It’s called ‘expert archivist’ because that is the prompt we gave it,” someone involved with the demo said.

> “I have a serious problem with the ‘expert archivist’ title,” another employee said.

> “Same here. If we have a disclaimer saying the generative AI can make things up and yet call it an expert archivist on the same tier as actual human experts…,” another chimed in.

You know, it's possible to write an article and filter out the useless complaints instead of throwing anything that supports your point at it. It's a system prompt for heaven's sake.

It's not terrible, but over half of the article being employees complaining about it is certainly a choice.

This is one of those articles that informs you more about how random people whose opinions you probably wouldn't care about feel about a thing than the thing itself. In this case it's just a fun way to dress up fud juxtaposed with marketing. The employees they're interviewing might be 100% right, the spokesperson for the project could be 100% right but the article does nothing to substantiate any of it. I'm no more informed than before I read it.