> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place.
I think the bigger danger would be that they'd lose the unimportant grunt work that helped the field exist.
Fields need a large amount of consistent routine work to keep existing. Like when analog photography got replaced by digital. A photo lab can't just pay the bills with the few pro photographers that refuse to move to digital or have a specific need for analog. They needed a steady supply of cat pictures and terrible vacation photos, and when those dried up, things got tough.
So things like translation may go that way too -- those that need good quality translation understand the need very well, but industry was always supported by a lot of less demanding grunt work that now just went away.
We aee currently wrecking the economics of running an informational website with ChatGPT and AI summaries. Who will bother reviewing products when Google places the conclusion right on top of the search results, before the source itself?
Likewise, who will bother chronicling things and putting information online without an audience? What will be the point of blogging and publishing photos or data that future historians will use?
There is so much grunt work that is no longer viable even at earlier steps in the chain. We will lose a lot to AI.
"Convince us"? There's no need for that at all. We've done all that ourselves.
Just check the latest budgets for university history departments.