AMIA 2024

Generative AI (GenAI) is flooding our world with a dizzying amount of synthetic media, and there is little guidance on how to responsibly navigate this new reality. The Archival Producers Alliance will present the Best Practices Guidelines we have developed for use of GenAI in documentary films. In this panel, we will explore the potential risks that GenAI presents to the Archive, to preservation, to the historical record, and to documentary film--as well as ways of mitigating these risks when using it. We will also discuss the methodology that went into developing the guidelines and how we see the Archival and Documentary spaces evolving in light of this powerful new technology.

Since the 2022 debut of Whisper, OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition software, an ecosystem of complementary tools and modifications has evolved, now offering organizations stewarding AV materials unprecedented opportunities to leverage this tool to increase the accessibility and discoverability of their digital collections. In this session, panelists from Emory, GBH, and Indiana will discuss their experiences and research implementing Whisper into their media management and preservation workflows, discussing Whisper’s performance across varied AV collections as well as the human impacts of working with Whisper. These insights from three organizations with varied scopes of collections and distinct but connected avenues of research may be helpful to a variety of organizations engaged in similar work or interested in starting up such a project. Attendees will gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of leveraging Whisper, the challenges and opportunities presented by the technology, and practical guidance on implementing or expanding AV accessibility-related projects.