Jamie Kelly, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Kafui Attoh (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies), along with their collaborator Don Bower of Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing, have received an award from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab for “Generative AI and the Social Value of Artifacts: The Case for Saving Photo Morgues.” The rise of generative AI will increase the value of physical repositories of knowledge that are not subject to digital manipulation. Going forward, we will increasingly need to be able to verify claims made in the digital world by using non-digital evidence. Given this, we call for the preservation of physical artifacts and the creation of new archives as a safeguard against the potential flood of AI-generated disinformation. Using the case of newspaper photo morgues, we argue that this preservation and safeguarding is especially important in hard cases where market imperatives and copyright diverge from the public’s new interest in preservation. With the support of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, we will develop a white paper aimed at exploring these themes.

The Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab, which is a key element of the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative, promotes broad-based, far-reaching interdisciplinary research, thought, and policy leadership in artificial intelligence and other technology ethics by engaging with relevant stakeholders to examine real-world challenges and provide practical models and applied solutions for ethical technology design, development, and deployment.