Historians

More specifically, the talk considers the possibility of agentic AI historians connected to curated knowledge bases, as well as online forums in which such systems autonomously engage in complex and sustained historiographical debates, with or without human historians in the loop.

As you might imagine, that resulted in many hours of conversations centered on the possibilities and potential threats that AI could present to us, both as teachers and as researchers. I’m David Trowbridge, a historian at the University of ...

The Society of Architectural Historians is a “major organization for the discipline,” Osayimwese said, noting that the society serves as a hub for collaboration between scholars and is important for training graduate students.

Automated tools now perform routine document analysis, reducing demand for entry-level historians. According to recent data, nearly 45% of historical research tasks are projected to involve AI integration by 2030, reshaping job expectations.

A report published in July 2025 by a group of Microsoft researchers, Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI, identified historians as the professional group with the second highest ‘AI applicability’.Footnote 1 With a score of 0.48, this number – which purports to indicate the overlap between a particular job’s typical activities and the extent to which they can be replicated by AI – is an aggregate of three other scores that measure ‘coverage’, ‘completion’ and ‘scope’.Footnote 2 Historians, the report suggests, have a coverage score of

I recently conducted an experiment with CoPilot using a piece of research I had already undertaken. In sharing this experience, I aim to show how this specific piece of A.I. does not fully grasp what historical analysis is. I will also discuss how this acts as a warning for historians regarding the future of A.I.

Unlike human historians who explicitly document their methodologies, AI systems are creating the historical archives of the future without crucial transparency around how sources are selected, weighted, and interpreted.

Across diverse applications—from ... translation and postcolonial scholarship—AI enables historians to process vast data, uncover hidden patterns, and engage with sources in novel ways....

In addition, we include content relating to the history of Artificial Intelligence, and scholars’ responses to earlier instances of technological — and especially digital — innovation, that may inform our own future responses to Gen AI. We hope this listing serves as a useful resource for historians and one to which we can add as new technologies, concerns, opportunities and perspectives are raised.

Ever since the times of Herodotus and Thucydides, we historians have generally relied on tried and tested methods – archival research, textual analysis, and manual data collection – to deliver rigorous analyses of the past.