This talk is a call to participate in the newly reformed IIIF AI community group. The International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium (IIIF-C) formed an AI/ML Community Group in 2023. The utility of IIIF in these contexts is clear, but the best practices in this domain are less so, and awareness of the full extent of IIIF capabilities is uneven. In forming the group, there was clear value in bringing together practitioners in this domain to gather and highlight use cases, align output formats, and promote interoperability more generally. At the same time, there has been a rapid growth of discussion of AI in the cultural heritage sector and the rapid growth of the AI4LAM community. The IIIF-C community has taken part in various ways at the six Fantastic Futures conferences, but there remains a disconnect between key components of the IIIF-C and AI4LAM communities. Starting in 2025, the IIIF-C began a refactoring process of the existing AI/ML Community Group that carried through at in-person discussions at the 2025 IIIF Annual Meeting (June 2025) with the goal of creating a new “IIIF AI” community group that will focus on working closely with the existing AI4LAM communities for common goals. Among these goals are raising awareness of IIIF in the AI4LAM community; integrating AI into IIIF workflows; exchanging ideas around best practices/guidelines related to IIIF and AI; and highlighting successful IIIF/AI implementations.
