A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. - The New York Times

The technology’s ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past? Credit... Photo illustration by enigmatriz Supported by By Bill Wasik Bill Wasik is the magazine’s editorial director. During my 25 years as a magazine editor, my favorite part of the job has always been helping writers figure out what the story is: where to start it, where to end it, what’s important and new about it. So it was with no small amount of humility that, earlier this year, I sat in a Google corporate cafeteria along the West Side of Manhattan and watched as one of my longtime writers — Steven Johnson, the technology journalist and historian — received that kind of guidance from an A.I. instead of me. Johnson, who has published popular histories about pirate attacks, the invention of modern policing and the birth of public health, had begun noodling on a possible book about the California gold rush of the mid-19th cen

The technology’s ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past? Credit... Photo illustration by enigmatriz Supported by By Bill Wasik Bill Wasik is the magazine’s editorial director. During my 25 years as a magazine editor, my favorite part of the job has always been helping writers figure out what the story is: where to start it, where to end it, what’s important and new about it. So it was with no small amount of humility that, earlier this year, I sat in a Google corporate cafeteria along the West