What’s next for AI and public history? You tell us!
29 September 2026 – Adina Langer
Just over three years ago, on July 21, 2023, History@Work put out a special call for pitches related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and public history. As a long-standing member of the History@Work editorial board and public historian committed to the thoughtful integration of new technologies into my work, I was a strong advocate for NCPH and History@Work to step into the public conversation about AI. In the time since then, only two posts have been published that directly responded to that call. My post published in October of that year addressed the likely effects on readers of the authoritative tone of text produced with ChatGPT, and Catherine Stiers’s November post reflected on the utility of ChatGPT as a tool for producing history-based content more expeditiously. AI has come a long way since 2023, so why only the two posts in response to this call?
The dearth of responses from members of the public history community might reflect a deep-seated ambivalence toward participation in the public scholarly conversation about the roll-out of this new technology. Goodness knows debates around the role of AI in the humanities are often heated, with some people taking a boosterish stance while others lament the end of intellectual work (and possibly human intelligence) as we know it. Even the Pope has recently weighed in!
Perhaps the lack of responses has more to do with the challenge of thinking about the breadth of potential implications for our field and for ourselves. After all, public historians are creators, researchers, laborers, employers, educators, and ethicists. And, of course, we are historians (of technological change, among other things). How should we approach a technology with ramifications for so many aspects of our identities?
As creators of interpretive content, AI might speed up our processes or hijack our self-expression. As researchers, it might grant us rapid access to the full corpus of human knowledge, or it might exacerbate our biases and amplify archival silences. As laborers, it might free up our time for higher-level thinking, or it might nullify our contribution potential and steal our livelihood. As employers, it might enable us to undertake more complicated projects with fewer resources, or it might turn our relationships with employees toxic and adversarial. As educators, it might allow us to focus more on critical thinking, or it might create a kind of plagiarism arms race. All of these dialectics have ethical implications. What has become clear to me in these past three years, is that, like the Internet that made it possible, AI is neither going away nor is it going to submit to a singular regulatory regime. It is the next disruptive technological frontier, and depending on its distribution, it has the power both to worsen inequality and resource extraction; and to solve enormous societal and environmental problems. It remains to be seen how social, economic, and political forces will shape its development.
It’s time to “sunset” the 2023 call for pitches on AI and public history. Photo credit: Adina Langer.
In classic Marxian fashion, it matters who owns (and influences) the means of production, what becomes a commodity, and which values shape the distribution of goods and services. Intellectual work is running up against the same automation pressures that first came for manual production. As analysts of change over time and experts in bridging the concerns of the present with their antecedents in the past, public historians know how to ask good questions about technological change. We also have experience communicating about relationships between labor and capital, training and experience, power and resistance. If we bring our experience and toolkit to bear, public historians could be there to guide our culture through this disruptive transition, even as we acknowledge our worries about its profound effects on our profession.
It’s important to remember that we’ve done this before. When I came of age as a public historian between 2006 and 2009, professors were still debating whether Wikipedia could be used as a legitimate tertiary source. Public historians like Roy Rosenzweig (co-founder of the Center for History and New Media) were in the vanguard of a movement to consider digital media on its merits. As a concept, “digital media” was novel enough to prompt the creation of a special Digital Media Group at NCPH, first led by the insightful anthropologist and labor historian Cathy Stanton. A decade later, digital media was so thoroughly integrated into NCPH’s fundamental functions (publishing, marketing, training, and professional development) that the maintenance of a special group no longer seemed necessary. What has lasted from this era of intense focus on the “digital” is a set of increased expectations around content accessibility and an understanding that historical literacy requires more attention to authenticity, sourcing, and iteration than it did before. In a technological era shaped by AI tools, these expectations will remain. However, public historians will also have to come to terms with pressures to produce content more quickly, the integration of AI into iterative research and writing processes, and new forms of pedagogy that acknowledge that writing alone is not a proxy for critical thinking.
What does this mean for History@Work and its call for posts that explore AI topics? Despite the lack of responses to our 2023 call for pitches, we know that our audience is very interested in AI. For example, the American Conservation Experience (ACE) and NCPH’s speaker series “Ethics, AI, and the Public Humanities” that ran from January through March of this year drew twice the average attendance for our webinars. Over the next few months we will be publishing a series of posts based on that series, and then we would like to launch a new special call with input from our readers. We encourage our readers to respond to this post in WordPress, or tag us and continue the conversation on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Bluesky. Please share thoughts on topics you’d like to see covered by respondents to a new special call about AI and Public History. What do you want to learn more about? Where do you feel stuck and in need of inspiration? What is missing from the conversation? We look forward to hearing from you and bringing more relevant content to History@Work!
~Adina Langer is a public historian based in Atlanta, Georgia. You can learn more about her by visiting www.artiflection.com.