Freely available Artificial Intelligence
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 4:32 am
tools are now able to extract words sung on 78rpm records. The results may not be full lyrics, but we hope it can help browsing, searching, and researching.
Whisper is an open source tool from OpenAI “that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.” We were surprised how far it could get with recognizing spoken words on noisy disks and even words being sung.
For instance in As We Parted At The Gate (1915) by Donald Chalmers, Harvey Hindermyer, and E. Austin Keith, the tool found the words:
All of the extracted texts are now available– we hope it is useful for understanding these early recordings. Bear in mind these are historical materials so may be offensive and also possibly incorrectly transcribed.
We are grateful that University of California Santa Barbara Library donated an almost complete set of transfers of 100 year-old Edison recordings to the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project this year. The recordings and the transfers were so good that the automatic tools were able to make out many of the words.
The next step is to integrate these texts into the browsing and accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database searching interfaces at the Internet Archive.
Posted in News | Tagged AI, AI & Research | 10 Replies
Generative AI Meets Open Culture
Posted on April 12, 2023 by Chris Freeland
How can public interest values shape the future of AI?
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been increasing interest in how AI can be used in the description, preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. While AI promises immense benefits, it also raises important ethical considerations.
WATCH SESSION RECORDING:
In this session, leaders from Internet Archive, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Foundation will discuss how public interest values can shape the development and deployment of AI in cultural heritage, including how to ensure that AI reflects diverse perspectives, promotes cultural understanding, and respects ethical principles such as privacy and consent.
Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the future of AI in cultural heritage, and learn how we can work together to create a more equitable and responsible future.
Speakers include:
More than one hundred supporters gathered on the steps of the Internet Archive last Saturday to rally support for our library in the face of a judgment that threatens the digital future of all libraries.
Digital rights advocate Lia Holland of Fight for the Future read from the letter signed by Neil Gaiman, Naomi A. Klein, Chuck Wendig, Karen Joy Fowler, Cory Doctorow and more than 1,000 additional authors who are speaking out on behalf of libraries, demanding that publishers and trade associations put the digital rights of librarians, readers, and authors ahead of shareholder profits.
Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who are representing Internet Archive in our lawsuit, underscored the valuable role that libraries play in protecting reader privacy; values that are not shared by the corporations and platforms that have become intertwined around ebooks. “When libraries can’t own ebooks, how private will your reading be?” Cohn asked. “Everyone deserves the right to read without someone looking over their shoulder.”
The Internet Law & Policy Foundry’s Lili Siri Spira spoke from her perspective as a “Gen-Z-Millennial cusper growing up on the Internet” about the importance of access to quality information in the face of book bannings and attacks on libraries. “As a former open-source investigator, I know first-hand how important open and free access to knowledge is in order to address the world’s injustices…As a former misinfo analyst, I know what information is out there to replace these burned books and it’s not good,” she said.
Whisper is an open source tool from OpenAI “that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.” We were surprised how far it could get with recognizing spoken words on noisy disks and even words being sung.
For instance in As We Parted At The Gate (1915) by Donald Chalmers, Harvey Hindermyer, and E. Austin Keith, the tool found the words:
All of the extracted texts are now available– we hope it is useful for understanding these early recordings. Bear in mind these are historical materials so may be offensive and also possibly incorrectly transcribed.
We are grateful that University of California Santa Barbara Library donated an almost complete set of transfers of 100 year-old Edison recordings to the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project this year. The recordings and the transfers were so good that the automatic tools were able to make out many of the words.
The next step is to integrate these texts into the browsing and accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database searching interfaces at the Internet Archive.
Posted in News | Tagged AI, AI & Research | 10 Replies
Generative AI Meets Open Culture
Posted on April 12, 2023 by Chris Freeland
How can public interest values shape the future of AI?
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been increasing interest in how AI can be used in the description, preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. While AI promises immense benefits, it also raises important ethical considerations.
WATCH SESSION RECORDING:
In this session, leaders from Internet Archive, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Foundation will discuss how public interest values can shape the development and deployment of AI in cultural heritage, including how to ensure that AI reflects diverse perspectives, promotes cultural understanding, and respects ethical principles such as privacy and consent.
Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the future of AI in cultural heritage, and learn how we can work together to create a more equitable and responsible future.
Speakers include:
More than one hundred supporters gathered on the steps of the Internet Archive last Saturday to rally support for our library in the face of a judgment that threatens the digital future of all libraries.
Digital rights advocate Lia Holland of Fight for the Future read from the letter signed by Neil Gaiman, Naomi A. Klein, Chuck Wendig, Karen Joy Fowler, Cory Doctorow and more than 1,000 additional authors who are speaking out on behalf of libraries, demanding that publishers and trade associations put the digital rights of librarians, readers, and authors ahead of shareholder profits.
Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who are representing Internet Archive in our lawsuit, underscored the valuable role that libraries play in protecting reader privacy; values that are not shared by the corporations and platforms that have become intertwined around ebooks. “When libraries can’t own ebooks, how private will your reading be?” Cohn asked. “Everyone deserves the right to read without someone looking over their shoulder.”
The Internet Law & Policy Foundry’s Lili Siri Spira spoke from her perspective as a “Gen-Z-Millennial cusper growing up on the Internet” about the importance of access to quality information in the face of book bannings and attacks on libraries. “As a former open-source investigator, I know first-hand how important open and free access to knowledge is in order to address the world’s injustices…As a former misinfo analyst, I know what information is out there to replace these burned books and it’s not good,” she said.