Civil War Ghosts in the Machine: How AI is Impacting our Study of America’s Defining Event

AI is everywhere these days. 

If you open social media, you can’t avoid AI-generated content. It’s earning wall-to-wall news coverage. If you use almost any online service, you’ll be offered some kind of AI chatbot or AI-enhanced (or at least, “enhanced”) services, whether you realize it’s powered by AI or not.

And for a growing number of people, the data centers that power AI are coming to your neighborhood, if they aren’t already there.

It’s hard to think of a technology with such wide-ranging impacts, that has been adopted so quickly and pervasively. It raises a remarkable number of questions about virtually every aspect of society – including the study of the American Civil War.

With that in mind, we’ve asked the writers and historians at Emerging Civil War to reflect on how AI is impacting their study of the nation’s defining conflict, and over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sharing their thoughts with you.