“John Masko rightly observes that "AI Won't Replace Historians" (op-ed, Aug. 18) because a computer can't replicate "the human spark." But another dynamic currently makes it impossible for AI to do historical research. According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, only 421.8 million pages out of an estimated 12 billion in their collections have been digitized. This is merely one of thousands of archives around the world, most of which are also largely undigitized and not likely to become fully available online anytime soon.
AI can be an asset to historians. Researchers at Columbia's History Lab, for example, have begun developing AI tools to augment historians' analysis of digitized sources. These resources may allow historians to produce ground-breaking scholarship. But AI is limited to those pages it can see. Most original records -- key sources of new insight -- are accessible only to humans. That means historical research will, for the foreseeable future, require real people to travel to real places and sift through real pages.
Digitization is a net good and should be accelerated. It democratizes access to records and helps historians study them in new ways. But since most historical evidence exists only in the physical world, we need to train, employ and fund more human historians to study a past that is invisible to AI.
Arlington, Mass.” [1]
1. AI Is the Future, but It Knows Little of the Past. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 21 Aug 2025: A14.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą