I want to comment on the use of AI for writing & research. Amateur & professional historians no longer have to physically visit brick & mortar libraries or various historic locations around the world. Most of everything has been or is being digitalized & available through any web browser. Just 10 years ago, I had to spend hundreds of hours searching through microfiche files, driving around town, reading old, musty books & making endless notes & photocopies. Anything written in a foreign language required finding a human translator. Now we have ChatGPT, CoPilot, Adobe AI Assistant, Google Gemini, et al to do all that for us & more via cyberspace!
We can find digitized books from the first days of print (late 15th century) stored in numerous free access internet library archives, download & have AI translate them into modern English & have it search the digital document for whatever you want. PDF24 Creator is another great tool to manage PDF archival data to create searchable PDFs, convert graphics-based PDFs to text, etc. AI will rewrite much of "history" as we know it. It is often said, "History is written by the victors!" & "History is fables agreed upon!" My AI-based radio history research is proving that true. For example, the ancient Romans were notorious for "retrospective mythmaking" in their favour. Today Hollywood, TV & social media have merrily carried this on with abandon, sometimes by accident but mostly deliberately. Most people simply cannot tell fact from fiction (nor can AIs). To identify Deepfakes requires anti-Deepfake counter-AI tools. But, if it is too good to be true then it is usually not! Never accept anything at face value & "doubt a little of your own infallibility" as Ben Franklin cautioned.
The caveat with AI-based research are the horrid
by mistake or deliberate "alternative" facts it will also provide you with. Most are usually glaring & obvious, but some
are not & deceptively subtle. The rule of research thumb is always to use three separate, verified sources & all must agree.
If not, you have to do more digging.
The new Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into MS Office. You can import varios AI tools & stick them on the ribbon bar. But avoid the tendency to use AI (Grammarly, et al) to write your article. You will end up with nothing but nonsense at worse or a boring article at best. AI written text is very easy to spot by any experienced editor or teacher so you will be found out! Especially more so if a sample of your text is on file. All teachers have to do to prevent students from abusing AI is have them write a paragraph “What I Did Last Summer” on the first day of class. Once their samples are digitally stored, teachers can use AI to match that student to any known writer in history (or school) to spot plagiarism, etc. Everyone has unique fingerprints & everyone has unique (subconscious) writing styles, whether they realize it or not. If AI reports that student "Adam" was writing at a grade 6 level on day one then later submits a report that the AI now scores at a grade 12 level, we have an obvious problem!
Yes, AI can read & analyze terabytes of digital data, but if any of that data is wrong, out-of-date, etc., it is not smart enough to determine the fact from fiction. It cannot make sense out of nonsense, as I have discovered. All it "knows" are the "fables agreed upon" & nothing more. It has no heart. And it certainly has no soul. An AI-hammer is still just a hammer. We humans determine how it is used; to build or do otherwise, IMHO.
February 15, 2025
