Reception: 4:00-4:30 pm
Lecture begins at 4:30 pm
2026 Presentation of the Samuel C. Chu Memorial Lecture Series in East Asian Studies
Presentation
Nearly four years ago in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5, which attracted an estimated 100 million active users within a matter of months. Its impact on the history classroom was immediate, as educators at all levels reported growing student use of generative AI across a wide range of assignments and assessments. Drawing on two years of work by the American Historical Association Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence in History Education, this talk examines some of the key challenges created by the rapid intrusion of generative AI into the classroom. One of the more troubling effects of these tools is their tendency to create a false sense of certainty. The outputs of Generative AI persuade many students that the past can be known completely, that the uncertainties and silences of the archive can be elided, that historical worlds can be reproduced in brilliant color, or that complex scholarly debates can be reduced to a single consensus. This talk explores my attempts to model uncertainty in an East Asian history classroom in the age of AI. It focuses on three digital humanities projects, including Virtual Angkor, which aims to depict a premodern Southeast Asian metropolis from the viewpoint of a visiting Chinese envoy, and JapanLab, which challenges students to create functional video games based around key topics in Japanese history and literature. The central question is how historians can use these and other tools to steer students beyond the illusion of certainty toward a deeper engagement with the gaps, ambiguities, and contingencies of the past.
Speaker
Adam Clulow is the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014), which won multiple awards including the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019). He is creator of The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an online interactive trial engine that received the New South Wales Premiers History Award in 2017, and Virtual Angkor with Tom Chandler, which received the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the 2021 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Alongside a new book on island sovereignty with Lauren Benton, he is currently working on a project to develop fully functional educational video games for Japanese history and literature.
