In June, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gave employees a presentation and tech demo called “AI-mazing Tech-venture” in which Google’s Gemini AI was presented as a tool archives employees could use to “enhance productivity.” During a demo, the AI was queried with questions about the John F. Kennedy assassination, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by 404 Media using a public records request.
In December, NARA plans to launch a public-facing AI-powered chatbot called “Archie AI,” 404 Media has learned. “The National Archives has big plans for AI,” a NARA spokesperson told 404 Media. It’s going to be essential to how we conduct our work, how we scale our services for Americans who want to be able to access our records from anywhere, anytime, and how we ensure that we are ready to care for the records being created today and in the future.”
Employee chat logs given during the presentation show that National Archives employees are concerned about the idea that AI tools will be used in archiving, a practice that is inherently concerned with accurately recording history.
One worker who attended the presentation told 404 Media “I suspect they’re going to introduce it to the workplace. I’m just a person who works there and hates AI bullshit.”
Should we also insist that archives dont use photocopiers and instead have scribes copy everything by hand?
If the photocopier is smart enough to do a scribe’s job then it deserves human rights, fair wages, and a pension just like the rest of us.
Given that photocopiers can do a scribes job (copy the text on this page onto a new page), more quickly and accurately to boot, I presume you are part of a pressure group to pay them pensions.
That’s not a scribe’s job, that’s not even the entirety of an apprentice scribe’s job (which also includes making paper, making ink, bookbinding, etc.)
A scribe’s job is to perform secretarial and administrative duties, everything from record-keeping and library management to the dictation and distribution of memoranda.
A photocopier is not capable of those things, but if it was then it’d be deserving of the same compensation and legal status afforded to the humans that currently do it.
We have to start treating things that claim to be “AI” as deserving of human rights, or else things are going to get very ugly once it’s possible to emulate scanned human brains in silicon.