The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to a series of meetings this winter quarter. This meeting is scheduled for March 4th (Tuesday) at noon in HUM 210 with guest speaker, Benjamin Breen speaking on “AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research.”

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly adept in fields amenable to reinforcement learning (like mathematics, translation, and coding), forms of research that depend on undigitized archives, tacit or embodied knowledge, and social relationships become more valuable, not less. Through case studies of how current LLMs perform historical analysis, translation, and transcription, I argue that the future of historical research lies not in resistance to AI tools, but in understanding how they complement rather than replace the more intuitive, social, and embodied aspects of research, such as physically visiting archives, conducting interviews, and gathering holistic knowledge of a place, culture, or milieu through physical presence. I will also discuss some related experiments in interactive historical simulations enabled by LLMs which approach the well-known “hallucination problem” as a feature, not a bug.

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches classes on early modern Europe, environmental history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. From July 2015 to January 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and a lecturer in Columbia’s history department. He received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His first book, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. His second book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, appeared in 2024. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his partner Roya Pakzad and their two daughters.