Category: nerd stuff

Unexpected AI Detectives: Colouring Book Fans

I’ve been interested in what Charles Goodwin calls “professional vision” for a couple of decades now. How do archaeologists learn how to see and understand archaeology? How do they translate and transmit that understanding to others using various media? It’s intrinsic to so much of archaeological knowledge production, particularly with different recording systems.

It’s become increasingly important to media literacy that we all develop a kind of professional vision of a different sort–detecting AI in the media we consume. For archaeological subjects it is generally extremely easy for archaeologists to identify AI, though this will potentially become more difficult as generative AI improves/consumes more archaeology-specific media.

So thinking critically about strategies wherein we can recognise generative-AI in images is incredibly important, particularly within a discipline that relies so heavily on the visual record. I found some unexpected inspiration on reddit, on the adult colouring subreddit. There are continual queries regarding AI colouring books, asking if images are AI, if it matters, and how to detect it within colouring books. It turns out that colouring helps guide and develop a professional vision–it’s another forcing function, as we identified in our paper on the importance of drawing in archaeology. The act of close attention, of colouring in the particular subject, it becomes obvious when the logic of the image does not hang together.

Take, for example, the image in the header. There’s a lot to annoy both the person colouring the page and the archaeologist. The breaks on the jugs don’t really work, the lines around the temple in the middle aren’t enclosed, so are annoying to colour. Though tbh I always fly around in a hot air balloon with a skull on it, so it got that right at least.

In pursuit of efficiency and digital workflows, many archaeological projects now trace photographs instead of drawing outright. There are some pedagogical problems with this, but it might actually help detect AI images to trace them to see if the various objects within the image actually fit together.

I also like the collective approach (I know, I would, right?) wherein people post on a different subreddit, RealOrAI, who have their own set of strategies to detect generative AI imagery and discuss their opinions on the topic.

Anyway, I could have spent some time trying to refine and improve the above image, and elements are fun (weird) and potentially inspirational. But you do lose out on the potential to connect with archaeological knowledge production in a different way. I don’t think it’s ever a waste to try to do something creative with your research, and drawing is a (scientifically proven) invitation for your brain to see and understand the past in new ways. The folks in the colouring subreddit are serious in their attempts to push the medium and represent different materials in new ways.

And who knows? Coco Wyo might just revive the honoured tradition of isometric drawing in archaeology.

Coco Wyo colouring page with isometric representation of a cozy office with a cat.

(this post was not sponsored, but if you want to talk about a cozy archaeology colouring book Coco Wyo hmu)

My “Dijkstra Moment” ?

I worked in the computer science department at the University of Texas as an admin while the legendary Edsger Dijkstra was still there. I still think about him from time to time.

Though a computer scientist, he famously eschewed computers, because he felt that the physical thing limited his ability to dream of new capacities for computing. As an admin this was less to keep track of but a bit annoying–he actually loved faxes which even then were being phased out.

Now as a lecturer who thinks about digital things, I have leaned heavily into practice. Working with technology helps me think critically about that technology. As a PhD student I’d be annoyed at the “pure theorists” who had never made the thing they are critiquing.

I think that’s very much our “brand” at York: critical, applied, political, digital archaeology. I encourage students to follow our lead and experiment with things, see what works, what breaks, and the “ah-hah” moments that come when they understand the affordances of tech are great.

But I do wonder if I’ll face my “Dijkstra moment” when the tech is no longer inspiring, but limiting in what I think a better digital archaeology could be. Or, as is often the case, my experiments with digital just point at something we don’t understand about “analog” archaeology.

We’ll see. I still like nerd stuff so the day may never come.

*None of this btw is to lionise the old heads of computer science. I have equal amounts of fairly problematic stories about the scions of CS that sort of just washed over me in that 90s pre-me-too era.

Creating RSS Feeds within Discord

One of the places that I’ve really loved over the last few years is Discord. Discord evokes old school message boards and is used extensively by gamers to message each other and use VoIP. Yes, another corporate platform that may go completely south, but so it goes. They’ll sell out, we’ll pick up sticks and move on. Anyway, I use Discord to check out new music, to chat with collectives, to manage my lab and Digital Archaeology and Digital Heritage students, keep up with the Open Source Intelligence community, and…assemblage theory. Obviously.

I was looking around for ways to revive RSS feeds to start subscribing to blogs and whatnots, and found out that there are Discord bots that you can use to collate content. So I started another Discord server as my own private RSS playground to keep track of blogs. I added Axobot to the server and through a pretty simple command, @axobot rss add (website) I can add different blogs to different channels. There’s more detailed instructions at this link.

I think I’ll add some academic journals and such as well.