{"id":29710,"date":"2025-06-16T09:01:03","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T09:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=29710"},"modified":"2025-06-16T09:26:40","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T09:26:40","slug":"a-i-is-poised-to-rewrite-history-literally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=29710","title":{"rendered":"A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally."},"content":{"rendered":"
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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\u2019s 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 \u2014 Steven Johnson<\/a>, the technology journalist and historian \u2014 received that kind of guidance from an A.I. instead of me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Listen to this article, read by Robert Fass<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption>
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Johnson, who has published popular histories about pirate attacks<\/a>, the invention of modern policing<\/a> and the birth of public health<\/a>, had begun noodling on a possible book about the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, he explained. But he was still at the point where he didn\u2019t know much more than that. \u201cWhat\u2019s my twist?\u201d he said. \u201cLiterally, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

To figure it out, Johnson had loaded some of his sources into NotebookLM, an app for researchers and writers that he himself helped build, after becoming the editorial director of Google\u2019s Labs division three years ago. Unlike most other A.I. tools, which draw their answers to questions from the mind-boggling infinitude of data they were trained on, NotebookLM draws only from files selected by the user, on the premise that most forms of research benefit from thoughtfully curating your source material.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Since the product\u2019s worldwide release last year, Google and Johnson have been promoting its utility for all manner of tasks, whether it\u2019s auto-generating minutes and takeaways from an audio recording of a meeting or encouraging a more licit use of A.I. among college students. NotebookLM\u2019s most viral capability is an auto-generated podcast, which in a matter of a couple of minutes will spit out a detailed conversation between two freakishly realistic voices, drawing out the key concepts of the source material. But as an occasional author of history<\/a> books<\/a> myself, I was most interested in how A.I. \u2014 one of whose many superpowers is the ability to inhale large amounts of text in an instant and offer credible summaries of it \u2014 might transform the way history is written.<\/p>\n

At Google that evening, as the sun went down over the Hudson, Johnson showed me the results of his experiments so far. He started his brainstorming process by giving NotebookLM excerpts from one of the finest existing histories on the Gold Rush, H.W. Brands\u2019s \u201cThe Age of Gold.\u201d He thought he might want to focus on the conflict between white gold-seekers and the Native American groups living in the Yosemite Valley in the 1850s, so he uploaded the text of an older source called \u201cDiscovery of the Yosemite,\u201d by Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, who was part of the Mariposa Battalion, the militia unit that rode into the valley in 1851. Next, to bring in the Indigenous perspective, he went to public-domain websites and found two accounts about the people whom the battalion expelled from the valley: \u201cThe Ahwahneechees: A Story of the Yosemite Indians\u201d and \u201cIndians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s 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 \u2014 Steven Johnson, the technology journalist and historian \u2014 received that kind of guidance from an A.I. instead of me.Listen to this article, read by Robert FassJohnson, 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 century, he explained. But he was still at the point where he didn\u2019t know much more than that. \u201cWhat\u2019s my twist?\u201d he said. \u201cLiterally, I don\u2019t know.\u201dTo figure it out, Johnson had loaded some of his sources into NotebookLM, an app for researchers and writers that he himself helped build, after becoming the editorial director of Google\u2019s Labs division three years ago. Unlike most other A.I. tools, which draw their answers to questions from the mind-boggling infinitude of data they were trained on, NotebookLM draws only from files selected by the user, on the premise that most forms of research benefit from thoughtfully curating your source material.Since the product\u2019s worldwide release last year, Google and Johnson have been promoting its utility for all manner of tasks, whether it\u2019s auto-generating minutes and takeaways from an audio recording of a meeting or encouraging a more licit use of A.I. among college students. NotebookLM\u2019s most viral capability is an auto-generated podcast, which in a matter of a couple of minutes will spit out a detailed conversation between two freakishly realistic voices, drawing out the key concepts of the source material. But as an occasional author of history books myself, I was most interested in how A.I. \u2014 one of whose many superpowers is the ability to inhale large amounts of text in an instant and offer credible summaries of it \u2014 might transform the way history is written.At Google that evening, as the sun went down over the Hudson, Johnson showed me the results of his experiments so far. He started his brainstorming process by giving NotebookLM excerpts from one of the finest existing histories on the Gold Rush, H.W. Brands\u2019s \u201cThe Age of Gold.\u201d He thought he might want to focus on the conflict between white gold-seekers and the Native American groups living in the Yosemite Valley in the 1850s, so he uploaded the text of an older source called \u201cDiscovery of the Yosemite,\u201d by Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, who was part of the Mariposa Battalion, the militia unit that rode into the valley in 1851. Next, to bring in the Indigenous perspective, he went to public-domain websites and found two accounts about the people whom the battalion expelled from the valley: \u201cThe Ahwahneechees: A Story of the Yosemite Indians\u201d and \u201cIndians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29712,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29710"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29713,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29710\/revisions\/29713"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}