AI assistants in the archive and the lure of ‘instant history’

Research seminar with Finola Finn

AI assistants are increasingly used for navigating and analysing the contents of major archives. Applying Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to existing large language models, these tools draw on indexes of the relevant archives to answer, in natural language, users’ questions. In addition to being powerful finding aids, archival AI assistants are also presented as being capable of providing useful, automated answers to questions about the past.

In this presentation, I will share my recent and upcoming research on the epistemological and historiographical implications of these tools. I argue that archival AI assistants and how they are marketed result in conceptual disruptions and uncertainties, placing pressure on our understanding of a range of roles, forms of information, and outputs involved in the production of historical knowledge. In particular, I argue that these tools may obscure well-established beliefs that ‘sources’ and ‘archives’ are not unmediated, clearly navigable, or necessarily comprehensive, and that the processes by which these are used to write ‘history’ are by no means straightforward or instantaneous.

With the aim of mitigating these misunderstandings, my collaborative work in this area provides suggestions for how deployers could more carefully frame and describe the intended use of archival AI assistants (especially for public users), to ensure that their benefits for accessibility are exploited while also avoiding misconceptions and safeguarding rigorous historical practice.

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