Personalization or ensloppification? When AI rewrites the web just for you
MyFest 2026
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Introduction
00:00 MyFest moderators introduce webinar
01:57 The dark side of AI personalization
Three stages of ensloppification
03:30 From augmentation to replacement
05:22 Stage 1: augmenting human authors
Should AI supplement biased archives with synthetic data about marginalized people?
09:59 Stage 2: competing with human authors
How does AI's reuse of tradition differ from human inspiration?
The erasure of provenance
The loss of human incentive
13:09 AI versions of authors and artists
Grammarly ventriloquizing famous authors
Jon recounts discovering an AI-generated version of his own site.
18:09 Stage 3: replacing human authors
19:14 What is advertising in the AI age?
"Is it influencing the answer [returned by a chatbot]?" - Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas
Proof of concept
21:05 A website that rewrites itself to suit each visitor
(I Do Not Think It Means) What You Think It Means link
Solutions to ensloppification
27:15 Mia Zamora and Alan Levine on AI versus humans creating the web
30:14 Mia: how does scraping work and can you evade it?
"Writing our own HTML is like going to the farmers market of the Internet."
"robots.txt is a No Tresspassing sign for your web server."
37:22 Demo: Headlines dynamically tailored to the viewer's politics
42:33 Sherine Aboelezz: the push for personalized AI in education
43:43 Mia Zamora: removing human relationships v. learning in community
46:29 An underrecognized incentive for data centers: ad tracking
Less than half of data center load since ChatGPT is AI!
When people read RSS feeds and made their own blogs and handmade web sites
Alan: "Instead of coming to visit each other in our houses, all we do is hang out at the mall."
Concerns about social media like LinkedIn being around in the future.
52:34 Solutions to biased news and online information
News aggregators like AllSides as a solution
Sherine: "Information literacy requires a form of 'biliterate brain.'"
This teleconference is a project of the University of Maine's Digital Curation program. For more information, contact ude.eniam@otiloppij.
Timecodes are in minutes: seconds
A third of recent websites now contain AI-generated text; Google is increasingly making AI summaries the default mode of knowledge retrieval; and third parties are creating “sloppelgangers” of artists’ web pages with AI. What might this trend mean for cultural heritage, and what should we do about it?
This workshop from 22 June 2026 led by New Media professor Jon Ippolito looks at the symptoms of this trend and creative responses to it. Ippolito unveils an interactive artwork created with artists Janet Cohen and Keith Frank that shows how AI can rewrite the same website according to different biases. Entitled (I Do Not Think It Means) What You Think It Means, the work presents an unsettling vision of a future where even critical discourse becomes algorithmically tailored to the reader's preferences. As the viewer interacts with this website, AI rewrites written documentation of past works by the artists in real time to align with biases suggested by the viewer's choices.
Workshop participants also explore a proof of concept website that rewrites today's headlines in real time according to the viewer's political leanings. The discussion concludes with a survey of strategies for combatting the biases introduced by AI-driven personalization.
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