Question of the Week: How is AI impacting Civil War scholarship?
In keeping with the series we’ve been running: How do you think that AI is impacting the study of the Civil War?
In keeping with the series we’ve been running: How do you think that AI is impacting the study of the Civil War?
AI has helped researching Civil War sources and pointing to information to be explored.
AI is scholarship antimatter. Th whole point of scholarship is Socrates’ first step. Know that you don’t know. Every subsequent first step reveals how much more there is to know. As AI is being used, the machine is learning, not the operator.
It has no impact. I bet it will affect scholarship!
Too early to tell
Making it easier to do research. Gives you more access to sources
Look at the split between Africa and South America. For decades the man who proposed they were at one time one, and that continental drift was the reason they weren’t one now, “outsider” Alfred Wegener, in 1912, was disregarded and thought skeptically of until science came around 50 years later. Imo, AI will improve scholarship and make scholarship much much better. It will raise questions historians today haven’t asked, or where historians have turned over their responsibility to other professions. Today the AI chicken is still in the server egg, but your grandchildren will have a better understanding than most of us, not only for Civil War scholarship, but history scholarship overall. People then may have their own personal AI, just like they have their own personal computer, unlike IBM thinking they needed to build only 5 computers a year at the dawn of computers. Today people are solving math problems that were previously unsolvable, despite the advent of handheld calculators in the 1980’s. There are still many fallacies we live with, and people who advocate an alternative explanation are called heretics, holocaust deniers, cranks, etc. AI will weigh in. It’s like asking how the invention of the telephone (or swap in any tool here) affected scholarship. AI is a tool, like radio is. We are the folks who remember what it’s like to drive a car, future generations will lose that skill, but they’ll still get from point a to point b. And if I see history correctly, like radio, like the buggy whip, the eight-track player, and typewriter, AI will have it’s day and its sunset.
AI is the future, and that future is now! It has, literally, all the potential in the world. I believe “potential” is a French word that means “You ain’t done nothing yet!” At least, that’s what the Internet tells me, so it MUST be true, right?
That said, at this point in time, and for some amount of time going forward, it is, and will remain, the proverbial “Garbage in, garbage out”. Those using it will still be subjected to the various ‘whims’ and thought processes they already have and employ. Will AI reach a point where it is considered, or anointed, as “infallible”? For those who intend to use it for research, will it simplify such research by possibly condensing sources and access to those sources, or will it complicate such things? Will human researchers be able to glean the good from the bad within AI presentations of data? Will manipulation of AI-based information be possible, so that those utilizing it can achieve conclusions that are more about what they WANT to believe, as opposed to what the data might actually be indicating? It really is a brave new world.
I personally don’t believe the “doom and gloom” predictions about it. That is mostly political in its orientation. I think if we as a country do our best to stay in the lead of AI development the ‘bad guys’ real and imagined won’t be able to unleash the mayhem some believe is possible. But it will be a ‘game changer’ in many ways. Get on board or get left behind!
It has not impacted my research methods at all so far. I like to keep the humanity in history.