I’m sometimes asked how I think history education and research will change in an era being reshaped by AI. I don’t trust anyone who claims certainty on the topic, because “AI” is such a moving target (and its impacts on the humanities so poorly understood) that any views are provisional.
But, it seems to me that we are entering an era in which traits like eccentricity and creativity are going to matter much more than before. Language models excel at pedagogies involving memorization, spaced repetition, and customized feedback. They are also getting good at “brute force” archival research. Yet they remain stuck in a median perspective, a sort of averaged-out, clichéd intellectual blandness that helps explain why frontier models still lack “research taste” in humanistic disciplines. (I think this is also why different frontier models converge on an oddly similar tone and subject matter when it comes to creative writing).
