Six Ways that I Have Used AI Over the Past Year (Part 1)

Over on the social media, there is ongoing conversation among people who find various forms of generative AI (and LLM) more useful for their work as historians and less useful. Actually, that’a charitable read on the conversation. Mostly it involves both sides making claims and digging in their heels. Questioning of the claims is mostly (and perhaps reasonably) treated as trolling, bad faith questioning, or even downright racism, sexism, or other forms of hostility. To be honest, it’s kind of gross and a disappointing parody of what social media could be (and still is at its best). Rather than wade into that morass (and to be clear, I do enjoy a good round of trolling as much as any social media user), I decided to write up something here. The point of this post isn’t so much to make the case for using AI as a historian, but to offer some perspectives on how I use AI that might give the often dogmatic conversation a bit more “grey area.” There are five ways that I’ve found AI useful…