Braving Trader Joes for holiday dinner prep. Send thoughts and prayers 😬

It. Doesn't. Actually. Understand. A. Single. Word. Of. What. It. Is. Fed. It just chops up sentences and calculates how often words follow each other. That's it. Nothing more. It can't summarize material for you because it doesn't understand that material.

Trained historians produce knowledge. We research in archives to write books/articles that reveal something new about our human past. The process starts with secondary source reading to get the context for what we view in the archives. No part of this process can or should be outsourced to AI. Ever.

ChatGPT could NEVER.

Many of the women doctors I studied for my forthcoming book didn't even have archives, in the sense that they had no dedicated manuscript collections at any archive whatsoever. Piecing together their lives and political work took some very creative thinking!

Wow. I will definitely show this to my students.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Omg I am watching the Simpsons on the couch because I don't feel great and its about ChatGPT!!! I am howling!

It's Dr. Thompson.

I still tell students to go to the library, look up the book that seems right and then step back and look over the whole shelf too.

Don't tempt me with a super fun time because I will definitely do this 😂😂😂

This is specifically about AI use in humanities disciplines within academia, which is clear from context- this crap is extremely harmful in that setting. Inevitably, people show up to be like "AI finds cancer cells tho". NOT THE SUBJECT, and that conflation has been inflicted upon us intentionally.

Story time. A grad student (not in history, not at my uni) wanted me to be on their committee as an external reader. They send their proposal. I read it, it's sort of oddly written and poorly argued, but maybe we can work with that I think. I turn to the citations. I see an article by a scholar

Hey professional historians! Guess what! All of us are wrong and we should be using AI because we also....wait for it .... we use the internet!!

Exactly. There’s been this huge sales pitch about the supposed benefits and inevitability of “AI,” but all I’ve seen show up since 2022 have been a steady stream of problems and complications due to LLM-powered chatbots (which are what are being sold aggressively to higher ed).

Yeah because right now its a great big Cheating Button 99.9% of the time. Not sure how we walk it back from that.

Who do you want to be? A person who knows how to fish or the person who asks AI for a fish?

Encouraging undergraduates to *start* with AI, robs them of the skills they need to begin learning how to be a history detective. And when you move up to the graduate level, AI doesn't have access to actual archives. And it cannot produce new knowledge. *YOU* have to do that.

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

Thanks Bluesky. Good convos. On day 1 of spring semester my students are gonna get a real zinger of a lecture on using AI.

People are going to commit murder whether we have laws against it or not Students are going to cheat whether we have rules or not. We must be clear about our rules, why we have them, & why we structure our courses the way we do. But we absolutely do not have to sanction the use of a cheating machine

People who are currently students: if you are using AI to summarize readings you are assigned, you are doing yourself a disservice of incredible proportions. Do you think, for example, that @jackiantonovich.bsky.social and I got to where we are in our careers because we took any kind of shortcut?

The advice says to start by asking the LLM to summarize it. Start by fucking reading it. If you need a summary, there's an abstract. There is ZERO need for these bullshit machines.

I tell my students explicitly to NOT do this and then I explain why - full of hallucinations, stolen material, mischaracterizations.

It’s also a basic skill in the humanities, at least! Surely, we can all agree that it’s not okay for a professional history association to tell us it’s fine if we offload/bypass this fundamental step/basic skill by using LLM generated summaries of books and articles to begin ‘critical engagement’

As everyone knows who has ever written a book or manuscript review, summarizing a text is essential work. It’s the first step of an analysis. If you haven’t summarized the text there is no way I believe that you have understood it.

The term "heritage American" being bandied about is irritating b/c of its imprecision. Is it based on length of time in the US of your ancestors, being from England, whiteness, legal citizenship, or some other unspoken category? Because the migration trends in the colonial period & early republic 1/

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

The google AI summary of my most famous piece of writing--a thousand word blog post--misunderstands it on a fundamental level. In doing so, it reproduces the way critical yet lazy scholars misunderstood it, by reading the title and filling in what they thought was the most likely meaning.

I don’t want your bullshit AI summary. Reading the article and writing your own summary IS the learning. Jesus H Roosevelt Christmas, we are doomed.

Attention AI sycophants: Professors will not back down on this. You are not the ones in the goddamn trenches dealing with the consequences of your willful ignorance about education/ research. It's sickening. It's evil. For shame.

Today I got a racist post taken down from one of our professional organizations and was also told I have "hate in my heart" for AI tech bros. I'm done! I just made shrimp and grits for dinner and now I'm going to the Nutcracker with my family.

We are doomed 😔

Update: post has been taken down.

Your response indicates again zero understanding of the implications for K12/higher ed, human society as a whole. Until yall figure out how to ensure its no longer a fucking Do-A-Quick-Plagiarism Button stealing personally from MY work there is no comparison to those other things you mention.

You have literally no understanding of what you and your ilk have unleashed in our world of teaching and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. I have spent hundreds of hours over the last year dealing with problems generated by your "invention." Reinventing my classes.

Hey OAH members. There's a post on Facebook that requires us to object. I did. Screenshot of post below and screenshots of email I sent to OAH leadership following.

This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:

Lol this. There's usually at least 2 to 3 forms

We already resolved this in 1868. The Court's taking up of this case is a disgrace of the highest order. Republicans want it both ways. Invoking originalism when it suits, tossing out otherwise settled law when it doesn't. The mind boggles. There is no logic to it other than racism and nativism.

Almost done with my entire book draft. "Women's Bodies, Doctors' Rights: The Medical Politics of the American Birth Control Movement" is a project that is more than a decade in the making. A story we think we know well. Turns out we don't.

The next 12 months will be the most consequential for American politics since the 1850s. I don't say that glibly. We warned what would happen and they've done it and more. It appears we still have free elections, and so now they will now throw everything they have at us, a fascist kitchen sink.

We look forward to seeing everyone in St. Pete Beach later this week at #2025SHA. please excuse our typo in the flyer - the Friday Annual Address and reception is at 4:30 pm!

We're proud to announce the CFP for our 50th Anniversary & 2026 conference: "Feminist Futurities: 50 More Years of Feminist Scholarship and Activism in the South" Check out the details on our website! Submissions due Dec. 1st! wgssouth.org/2026conference #AcademicSky #edusky #highered #wgs

Our historian colleague Tom Alter has now officially been fired as of yesterday 10/13 for making a speech on his own time at home on a sunday morning. Donate. Stand up for free speech. Stand up for Tom. www.gofundme.com/f/support-fr...

SHGAPE needs your help! Please check out the following announcement and consider applying. And while you're at it, check out the SHGAPE Blog. Some really great scholarship is published there. share.google/J5ZcMLYwWro5...

The Countdown to #2025SHA has officially begun! Mark your calendars for the @sawh1970.bsky.social member/grad student breakfast & the annual address/reception by Crystal Sanders, Associate Professor of Af-Am Studies/History @ Emory University! Find breakfast tix at (thesawh.org/sawh-confere...)