Jon Ippolito

@jonippolito.net

3807 Followers 317 Following

How does tech empower and frustrate creators—writers, programmers, media makers—and how do we keep their work alive in the long run? UMaine Professor of New Media, Director of Digital Curation; former Guggenheim Curator of Media Art https://jonippolito.net

Screenshot from ABC News with photo of Trump at podium and headline "White House teleprompter operator made more than $100K betting on Trump's speeches: Sources"
Screenshot of a Substack post titled “Corruption gets its own platform” by Jon Ippolito, dated July 15, 2026. Below the headline is a photo of a roulette wheel surrounded by stacks of multicolored casino chips, visually linking gambling with the article’s discussion of prediction markets and corruption.
News anchor in a newsroom in front of a "News Center Maine" sign, with an inset image showing a person holding an open book beside library shelves.
Quote: "Students do not experience learning separately from belonging" — Rhoan Garnett
Infographic titled "Digital Curation skills" showing interlocking gears labeled with digital curation tasks, including choose metadata, create database, digitize analog media, put exhibition online, build website, visualize data, copyright, backup data, migrate files, archive documents, 3D scan, save source files, cloud, RAID, Omeka, and emulation.
Graphic stating that 14% of Americans would support a data center being built in their community, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll citation and a small interview inset.
Tablet centered in a softly lit blue-and-peach corner displays the text “(I do not think it means) what you think it means,” while shadows of a flower and a dagger appear on opposite walls, suggesting meanings beyond the words on the screen.
Pie chart titled “Loads on data centers built since ChatGPT.” It shows AI workloads accounting for an estimated 35% (conservative) to 44% (liberal) of load, while non-AI workloads account for 56–65%. The chart emphasizes that a majority of load on recently built data centers is still non-AI, despite AI representing a substantial share. Source: EPRI estimates (2024, 2026); calculations by Jon Ippolito.
A chart showing a log-log scatter plot that shows big tech is spending far more on AI than it earns from it. The x-axis shows annual data-center and compute spend in billions of dollars on a logarithmic scale from $25B to $300B. The y-axis shows AI revenue run-rate in billions of dollars on a logarithmic scale from $0.35B to $320B. Seven companies are plotted as purple dots. xAI sits at $31B spend and $0.5B revenue, the lowest revenue point. Oracle is at $60B spend and $12B revenue. OpenAI is at $120B spend and $25B revenue. Meta is at $135B spend and $0.5B revenue, far below all others at its spending level. Alphabet is at $185B spend and $30B revenue. Microsoft is at $190B spend and $37B revenue, the highest revenue point. Amazon is at $200B spend and $15B revenue. A green dashed diagonal line marks break-even where revenue equals spend; all companies sit far below it. A red dashed diagonal line marks 10% revenue recovery; most companies cluster near or below it. Vertical error bars on Oracle, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft show the estimated range between reported AI revenue and a conservative first-party-products-only floor, with Oracle having the longest bar, dropping from $12B to approximately $1.5B.
Lance Eaton
Word cloud for DIG 540 course, including "collection", "database", "web", etc.
Turn off GitHub’s default training on your code via Settings > Copilot > Features > Privacy
Faces of Ben Brumfield, Jon Ippolito, Greg Nelson, and Ethan Morin on screen during the teleconference
Suspicious trades before Iran war announcements on the West Texas Intermediate oil futures exchange, 23 March 2026. Source: CNBC.
UPCOMING WEBINAR How Green Is Your Prompt? April 2, 2026 9:00 AM PDT, 11:00 AM CDT, 12:00 PM EDT
A roulette wheel
A graphic showing a teacher, robot, and students collaborating in a workflow, next to the words "AI Foundations for Educators," UMaine Online, March-April 2026
Screenshot showing that a UMaine digital preservation course is eligible for grant funding
A word cloud of concepts related to digital curation
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A screenshot of the DPOE website showing UMaine’s Digital Preservation class as a recommended training
A graphic with silhouettes representing different groups who typically vote absentee, with a link to the website https://saveabsentee.me.
News headline from Techradar about rumored minute-long AI videos coming from Veo 3.1
A word cloud in the shape of a clock with terms from digital curation.
"Do you want to change Maine election laws to eliminate two days of absentee voting, prohibit requests for absentee ballots by phone or family members, end ongoing absentee voter status for seniors and people with disabilities, ban prepaid postage on absentee ballot return envelopes, limit the number of drop boxes, require voters to show certain photo ID before voting, and make other changes to our elections?" —Maine Question 1 on Tue November 4th
Ken Jacobs inspecting one of his projectors, ca. 1995
A screenshot of the speakers bureau from Learning With AI with a grid of names and a tag cloud for filtering by expertise
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The front page of artistsnclients.com with the word "hacked" stamped on it.
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An image of a miniature museum in a person’s hand, with the text "Honey, AI Shrunk the Archive: Large Language Models as Compression Algorithms"
A schoolroom with children at desks and the title "AI IMPACT RISK" behind them out the window.
A diagram showing the coherent force vectors proposed by the scientific model of a planetary orbit versus the arbitrary vectors proposed by transformers. 
AI bots responding to the Jim Acosta interview story on Bluesky
A screenshot from the ASIS&T web site with this text: Webinar: Who Even Wrote This? Welcome to the Post-AI LibrarySponsored by: NEASIS&T ChapterLibraries and other digital collections are beginning to see a surge in AI-generated submissions—sometimes dozens from the same author. This growing strain is colliding in the US with an increasing threat to staff and budgets due to the administration's aim of dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This webinar will open by framing generative AI as a lossy compression of human knowledge—useful in some contexts, but risky when it replaces ground truth in archives and collections. From there, we’ll walk through five possible policy responses to the surge in AI-generated submissions, from outright bans to “AI shelves” to community review. As AI writing becomes harder to detect and more embedded in everyday tools, we’ll also ask whether traditional ideas of authorship, verification, and even the library itself need to be rethought.
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A box of office files transforms into bright digital fragments
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A headline from mobile gamer.biz reading "Laid off King staff set to be replaced by the AI tools they helped build, say sources"
Citation for "Medium, Message, and Miyazaki: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Creativity in the Ghiblification of Al-Generated Art on Online Platforms" MD Varleite - 2025 ... Sofian Audry and Jon Ippolito extend this affective lens to a more relational understanding of authorship. They argue that “the ‘artist’ as it matters for art history is not the actual person but the construct that lives in the minds of a work’s beholders” (2019)
Slide from MyFest 2025 talk naming webinar leaders Tai Munro and Jon Ippolito
Slide from MyFest 2025 talk showing energy and water use of different digital activities
Opening slide for "Sizing up AI’s environmental footprint for your students–and yourself" with Jon Ippolito and Tai Munro
A TV interview with two men in suits.
There's an inherent social contract in democracy where ultimately the ordinary person has a certain amount of leverage because they're contributing to the economy. If that leverage goes away, then it's harder to make democracies work, and it's harder to prevent concentration of power. —Dario Amodei on CNN, 30 May 2025
A library overflowing with thousands of books pouring out of every window and door, spilling into the street in every direction, generated by Leonardo.ai
The IMPACT RISK acronym covers: * Infowar (disinformation) * Monopoly (centralization) * Plagiarism (appropriation) * Automation (job loss) * Climate (footprint) * Tainted Data (bias) * Reality Distortion (fabrications) * Injustice (exploitation) * Stereotyping (cliches) * Knockoff Experiences (shortcuts). These downsides are explained in detail in the explainer page at https://AI-Impact-Risk.com. All infographics are public domain so no attribution is needed.
An announcement featuring a book on desk in a brightly light, futuristic library with glowing wires connecting the pages of the book to the shelves.
A slide from Meta’s antitrust trial showing black rectangles over private information and then the same slide with the redacted information revealed.
A diagram showing how an English sentence can be encoded in DNA
A painting of the death of Julius Caesar
A book on desk in a brightly light, futuristic library. Glowing wires connect the pages of the book to the shelves.
An image of a miniature museum in a person’s hand, with the text "Honey, AI Shrunk the Archive: Large Language Models as Compression Algorithms, Thursday 3 April, Noon to 1PM EDT