AHA Session 299
Sunday, January 7, 2024: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Cyril Magnin II (Parc 55, Fourth)
Chair:
Cindy Ermus, University of Texas at San Antonio and Age of Revolutions
Panel:
Abraham H. Gibson, University of Texas at San Antonio
Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University
Zoe LeBlanc, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Katherine McDonough, Lancaster University
Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond
Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University
Zoe LeBlanc, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Katherine McDonough, Lancaster University
Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond
Session Abstract
While the term “artificial intelligence” is by no means new, the last three years have seen the proliferation of commercial products branded as AI, from DALL-e and ChatGPT to the recent Bing Search – all of which claim to allow radically new ways for users to interact with information, whether through AI-assisted writing, synthetic image generation, or far more extensive search capabilities. Though there has been debate over whether these tools are actually AI, or what AI even means, what remains unclear is how this will impact historians and historical research. We propose a roundtable that will help historians contextualize, clarify, and demystify what we talk about when we talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Participants will discuss their experiences engaging with so-called AI tools and methods during every stage of the research process, from collection and curation to analysis and interpretation. Using Lara Putnam’s prescient call for historians to grapple with how digital search and computational methods are changing the profession in her 2016 AHR article as a launching point, we will discuss how these tools can both further existing historical research using machine learning, whether in computer vision or text analysis, and also open up new avenues, with the advent of powerful deep learning and transformer models. Similarly, some participants will discuss how they have deployed AI in the classroom, and how those experiments have fared. In addition to discussing the potential applications of AI, however, we are equally interested in discussing the potential implications of AI for the historical record, the historical profession, and the communities we serve. Ongoing questions include whether and how these tools will become critical scholarly infrastructure, as well as the broader ethical and political considerations of relying on commercial platforms for research as opposed to open-source software libraries. While we anticipate that new AI tools will be released by the time of the next AHA conference, our roundtable will be discussing the latest trends in the profession, and we are eager to hear from any attendees who can contribute their own experiences, ambitions, and anxieties when it comes to AI. Crucially, our proposed roundtable will also give historians a chance to reflect on and discuss the published roundtable on artificial intelligence that is slated to appear in a forthcoming issue of American Historical Review.
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