A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. - The New York Times
whose training allows it to understand almost the whole internet, as ChatGPT does, even if it constrains its answers to the uploaded sources
ommunication department at Stanford.
Mark Humphries, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario,
used A.I. to analyze tens of thousands of handwritten records about late 18th- and early 19th-century fur trading, in order to better understand the far-flung community of traders
The goal is to find not just one-to-one transactions between specific voyageurs but chains of interconnection that would be hard for human researchers to make quickly.
— Steven Johnson, the technology journalist and historian
Humphries — like Steven Johnson — is swimming in the deep end of A.I experimentation
Jefferson Cowie of Vanderbilt, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his book “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power.”
that their attitudes toward A.I. lived in the shadow of their students’ cheating with it, which simultaneously made them reluctant to touch it but also seemed to have made them understand just how powerful it was as a tool.
I am haunted by the fact that it would be hypocritical for me to use A.I. given how concerned I am with my students’ use of it,”
Charles C. Mann, author of “1491” and, most recently, “The Wizard and the Prophet,
That’s what A.I. can’t do. It has no bullshit detector.”
While the tool does occasionally misrepresent what’s in its sources (and passes along errors from those sources without much ability to fact-check them), constraining the research material does seem to cut down on the types of whole-cloth fabrications that still emerge from the major chatbots.
Stacy Schiff, the author of decorated biographies of Cleopatra and Véra Nabokov,
To turn to A.I. for structure seems less like a cheat than a deprivation, like enlisting someone to eat your hot fudge sundae for you.”
third century B.C., when Callimachus wrote his “Pinakes,”
a series of books (now lost) cataloging the holdings of the famous library (now lost) in Alexandria, humanity has devised increasingly sophisticated systems for navigating pools of information too large for any one individual to take in.
The rise of computers and the internet were of course an unprecedented turning point in the history of tools for writing history — exponentially increasing the quantity of information about the past and, at the same time, our power to sift and search that information. Psychologically, digital texts and tools have thrown us into an era, above all, of “availability”: both in the colloquial sense of that word (everything’s seemingly available) and in the social-scientific sense of “availability bias,” whereby we can fool ourselves into thinking that we have a clear and complete picture of a topic, buffaloed by the sheer quantity of supporting facts that can spring up with a single, motivated search.
“Technology has exploded the scope and speed of discovery. But our ability to read accurately the sources we find, and evaluate their significance, cannot magically accelerate apace. The more far-flung the locales linked through our discoveries, the less consistent our contextual knowledge. The place-specific learning that historical research in a predigital world required is no longer baked into the process. We make rookie mistakes.”
University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam
But she worried about what was being lost, especially given that the pool of digitized sources, even as it keeps growing, remains stubbornly unrepresentative: biased toward the English language and toward wealthy nations over poor ones, but biased especially toward “official” sources (those printed rather than written, housed in institutional rather than smaller or less formal archives
Gazing at the past through the lens of the digitizable,” Putnam notes, “makes certain phenomena prominent and others less so, renders certain people vividly visible and others vanishingly less so.”
composing texts that are just plausible enough to make human work irrelevant.
The individual sources would fade yet further into the background, as users trust tools like NotebookLM to offer cogent-seeming summaries of enormous troves of texts without much attention to their origins or agendas. What becomes staggeringly “cheap,” in such a world, is work that attempts to synthesize astonishing amounts of material, perhaps drawing on sources far beyond what a single human could process in a lifetime, ranging promiscuously across languages, borders and time periods, at a speed that would allow a single human to complete multiple such projects in a career.
Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs,
Beyond that, many of them — the mind-boggling video-generation engines, in particular — seem likely to accelerate the cultural changes that have made serious writing less and less relevant in the internet era. Perhaps it was naïve to even worry about A.I.’s competing with historians, when the typical user, amid a life increasingly consumed with other, nonverbal diversions, is satisfied to receive facts on demand in bite-size bursts.
What if e-books of history came enhanced with a NotebookLM-like interface?
That way, “instead of just a bibliography, you have a live collection of all the original sources” for a chatbot to explore: delivering timelines, “mind maps,” explanations of key themes, anything you can think to ask.
