Artificial Historians

by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Anne Martin, Lewis Yarlupurka O'Brien

Overview

This book offers readers an introduction to the world of artificial histories and historians. It looks behind the interfaces of AI and explores everyday platforms and prize-winning history books to identify how people and algorithms make histories and how they might make histories in the future.

Every moment around the globe, histories are made about ordinary people who use digital devices. These histories are not made by professional historians or even by humans but by artificial intelligence that scours our digital footprints for patterns. AI histories not only shape recommendations about what we might buy or stream but also our access to education, healthcare, and justice. The outcomes of recommendation systems are not just a technology problem or an ethics problem. This book argues that this is also a history problem, and it needs to be understood as one if we are to make fairer or more just systems. It shows us that the deep history of history making—including Australian Aboriginal and First Nations histories—can help us to navigate the future of history in AI.

Presenting readers with a range of familiar and accessible examples, Artificial Historians is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and all those interested in global historiography, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032229942
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/21/2025
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marnie Hughes-Warrington is Distinguished Professor of History at Adelaide University, Australia. She is the author of many historiography texts, including Fifty Key Thinkers on History (2014), History Goes to the Movies (2007), Big and Little Histories (with Anne Martin, 2022), and History From Loss (with Daniel Woolf, 2023).

Anne Martin is Director of the Tjabal Indigenous Higher Education Centre at the Australian National University, Australia. She is co-author of Big and Little Histories (2022, with Marnie Hughes-Warrington) and is an Aboriginal rights activist and educator who is dedicated to changing the future for our next generation of leaders.

Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien is Senior Elder, educator, adviser of the Kaurna People of the Adelaide Plains, Australia, and is recognised as a leader of reconciliation. He is a writer and speaker of the Kaurna language and has played a critical role in its recognition and growth. He is the author of And the Clock Struck Thirteen (2007), a memoir as told to Mary-Anne Gale.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Advisory for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Readers

Advisory about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Words and Philosophy in this Book

1. Hello, History

2. A Test for Histories

3. History’s Topics

4. History’s Times

5. History’s Places and Grounds

6. History’s Bodies and Authorities

7. History’s Questions

8. History’s What Ifs

9. History’s Possible and Impossible Worlds

10. Standing with History - With Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s Artificial Historians is a groundbreaking book on likely the most important topic facing historians today. Hughes-Warrington brings the reader into the rapidly developing world of artificial intelligence with care and skill [. . . providing] a powerful and persuasive diagnosis of how current trends in AI push historians toward becoming passive receptors and [arguing] that the real danger of the current AI moment is our own abdication of responsibility. Hughes-Warrington demonstrates that this does not need to be our fate. For the engaged historian there are multiple ways history can be made, which also means there are multiple ways for history to take up ethical and political action in the future.”

Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University, USA

“Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s book continues her ongoing, thought-provoking explorations into what makes us historical beings. Blending philosophy, historiography, and computer science in a highly readable meditation on artificial intelligence’s understanding of the past, she asks whether and how machines can be as effective makers of histories as humans and offers some surprising answers.”

Daniel Woolf, Queen’s University, Canada

“Artificial Historians challenges us to think differently about the potential for AI-generated histories. What is the difference between those we humans write and those generated by machines? Marnie Hughes-Warrington offers a clear argument about their similar logics but also a reminder that algorithms are human creations and thus amenable to our management and direction. Anyone concerned about the future of history-writing in the age of electronic knowledge production will need to grapple with the practical and ethical issues this book addresses.”

Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, USA

“The enchanting, passionate storytelling in this volume shows the way to what Hughes-Warrington calls the ‘entanglement’ of humans and computers. This is a powerful volume about the open-endedness of history and about the role that historians should have in designing AI if we are to live with machines that recognize the open-endedness of our destiny as a species.”

Jo Guldi, Emory University, USA

“A fascinating exploration of the logics that constitute, and that are at work in, artificial and human history-making, that contribute to the twin tasks of making history and AI better through sustained, disciplined enquiry into the nature of both. [. . .] The result is a highly illuminating and original rebooting of our thinking about the defining features of conventional human-, and emerging and established machine-histories. [. . .] The book is [. . .] remarkable for its freshness and accessibility and for the spirit of open enquiry and intellectual excitement and curiosity that it conveys.”

Arthur Chapman, Institute of Education, University College London, UK

From the Publisher