N England (Lincs./Yorks.), English, meow mostly. Kittens or cats wanting fed particularly insistently will mew.

As you should, for my money (which will go to your Patreon if that's the route you go down) you're one of the best history communicators in the game. Whatever business thinks, the audience will look for passion, knowledge, and craft, and they'll find it wherever good creators are.

...and misses the greater part of what a historian does which is interpret that information, which no LLM is remotely capable of. That's before you get into the lack of ability to critically assess info and whether it's true or even plausible. Totally agree with you on their motives though!

From the paper, it looks like their rationale is that Copilot can 'research historical information', but what they mean by research is 'scan through the already written (generously, possibly digitised primary source) data our model has harvested/ stolen', which isn't research in any useful sense...

The assertion seems founded on a complete lack of understanding of what it is historians actually do and the skills and work required, and I suspect the same is true of many of the other claims by AI firms that 'AI will soon replace [X]'

I feel if you try and separate politics from anything you’re a bad historian.

I'd nominate Bernard Knox, Bradford-born classicist, International Brigade volunteer and special forces fighter in WWII. His essay 'Premature Anti-Fascist' might make interesting material for your students - it's very readable.

I see there's a petition - please do consider signing.