History in the Age of Algorithms: A Prospective Reflection on the Introduction of Artificial Intelligence in History in the 21st Century

This article looks at the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on three aspects of historical praxis: discovering and reading primary sources, interpreting them, and then writing about them and disseminating the culminating research. Corpora of sources are collected, collated, and processed using algorithms based on machine learning. The production of sources is modified by the development of large language models (LLMs), giving rise to plausible rather than true or authentic documents, and thus inviting us to reflect on the future of historical criticism. In terms of reading, AI is already being used to crossreference documents, enabling us to ask new questions of very large corpora. Finally, the writing of historical texts is now being affected by AI: the main office software packages already offer LLM-based writing aids (including ChatGPT). These developments are forcing us to reconsider the role of the historian as author.