AI is going to give us the power to extrapolate information from the past like never before. With a few lines of text I may be able to create a feature film on Abraham Lincoln, how much of that will be 'frog DNA' spliced in to keep the story going? Which may be used as source data for something else, and so on. The past is already a game of telephone into the future. With the ability to fill in the blanks provided by AI, the signal to noise goes way down. Figuring out the actual real source information becomes a lot more valuable, but without locking down that source information today we may lose the ability to verify many pieces of information as sources versus AI creations in the future.
There is a difference. Humanity lies, but until now it could not retroactively mass fabricate truth so convincing that even people current day skeptics had trouble seeing through. When I say current day, I mean in the past, a genocide was being seen as such by at least part of the human population, but than that truth was erased by storytelling. Today, events are fabricated into existence by AI. You go to google to find alternative resources and you can’t trust them either. You can’t verify because it is too costly to verify every single thing you see/hear/read. It’s a problem.
I can imagine a couple million years from now, some alien species shows up, we’re all gone and they think maybe we had wings, some of us were born with blue hair and other were half robots. I get they can study some of our remains, but so much of us is mutable digital info now.
Is good to remind that history is always written by the winner side by necessity.
Also they usually like to burn any -history- or -culture- of the loosing side and adapt their customs to their new ones and call it a day, erasing history pretty much, as much of it as they can at least.
- You usually can attribute history written by a victor to said victor;
- There's only so much control a victor has over what's being kept by the monks, librarians, museum curators and individuals, and what of it will resurface once they're gone.
With AI, we're not talking about alternative history, but rather about infinite, arbitrary alternative histories that can't be told apart from the real one.
