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Half an hour ago I put down the Atkinson Book Fate of the Day on page 188 to ask Chatgpt where it went to to answer “detailed” questions about the American Revolution. (I wondered if Atkinson might be a source. He himself has an extensive section of endnotes) I have in the last week arranged four AIs on my cellphone and begun using each one to help me learn French. My use of Duolingo now is only seven to ten minutes a day now to extend my “streak.” The streak stands a couple hundred below 3,000 days and having read in Atkinson’s first book on the Revolutionary War, “The British are Comming” that the war lasted 3,089 days I have it in my head to equal that streak in Duolingo.
Harry asks:
So here is my fourth blog post of the day. Its been ages since I posted so much in a single day. And the third post which precedes this one is in French. It is a DeepL translated copy of the post preceding it which I wrote today in English with a picture of a hanging noose and Attorney General with faux merde sur son visage. But this post on AI, artificial intelligence, is especially worthwhile and the title above is right on target. These are 4 questions I posed and the NON HUMAN Chatgpt’s excellent replies: Note: if you only want to read my questions I have bolded them. Here is my first question in this series:
When you are asked detailed questions about America’s revolution what are ten of your most trusted sources and how would you rank them for their veracity?
Chatgpt answers:
1. Primary Sources (Archives & Collected Papers) ?????Examples:
Founders Online (National Archives)
The Papers of George Washington
The Adams Papers
Why #1:
These are letters, diaries, orders, congressional records, and contemporary newspapers. They are closest to the events themselves.
?? Caveat: They require interpretation—authors had biases, limited knowledge, or political motives.
2. Bernard Bailyn ?????
Key work: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Why:
Bailyn revolutionized understanding of revolutionary political thought using massive pamphlet analysis. Extremely rigorous, widely cited, and still foundational.
3. Gordon S. Wood ?????
Key works: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic
Why:
Master of political culture and institutional change. Clear arguments, deep primary-source grounding. Occasionally debated—but always seriously.
4. Jack P. Greene ????½
Focus: British imperial system, colonial constitutional thinking
Why:
Essential for understanding how colonists legally understood their relationship with Britain. Strong corrective to overly nationalist narratives.
5. The Oxford History of the United States (Revolutionary volumes) ????½
Why:
Carefully edited, peer-reviewed syntheses by top historians. Excellent balance between narrative and scholarship.
6. The Journal of American History / William and Mary Quarterly ????½
Why:
Top peer-reviewed journals.
If a claim survives debate here, it is very solid.
?? Articles can be narrow or technical.
7. Joseph J. Ellis ????
Key works: Founding Brothers, American Sphinx
Why:
Excellent synthesis and interpretation of personalities.
?? More interpretive and literary than Bailyn or Wood—still reliable but less archival-heavy.
8. Charles Royster ????
Key work: A Revolutionary People at War
Why:
Outstanding on military culture and popular participation. Less quoted than others, but very careful.
9. The Library of Congress & National Archives (curated exhibits) ????
Why:
High-quality document curation with conservative interpretation. Very reliable for factual grounding.
10. Recent Academic University Press Monographs ????
Examples:
UNC Press
Harvard University Press
Yale University Press
Why:
Strong peer review and documentation. Ranking varies by author, but generally trustworthy.
Sources I Treat with Caution ??
Not ranked above, but important to mention:
Popular history without citations
Politically motivated narratives (left or right)
Textbooks written primarily for patriotic instruction
Older 19th-century histories (useful, but often romanticized)
How I Actually Answer a Question
When you ask something detailed (e.g., Did Washington order X? or What did colonists believe legally?), I typically:
Check primary sources
Compare two or more top historians
Look for scholarly consensus vs. dispute
Flag uncertainty when evidence is thin
If you’d like, next time you ask a Revolutionary question, I can also tell you which tier of evidence I’m relying on (primary vs. interpretive).
Harry Asks:
I am impressed but this leads me to another question. Are these points of view ones that you have formulated on your own and or are they in part formulated by the parameters your creators or owners have given to you to follow?
Chatgpt Answers:
That is a thoughtful question, and it deserves a careful, plain answer. The short version is this: the points of view I gave you are not “beliefs” I hold in the human sense, and they are not dictated line-by-line by my creators either. They emerge from how I am trained to reason about evidence.
Here is the clearer, longer explanation.
I do not have personal opinions, convictions, or loyalties. I don’t decide that Bernard Bailyn is trustworthy in the way a historian does after years in archives. Instead, during training I was exposed to an enormous body of writing—primary documents, academic history, methodological debates, and critiques of those debates. From that, I learned patterns: how professional historians argue, how evidence is weighed, and which standards are widely accepted in the field.
When I rank sources by veracity, I am essentially reproducing the consensus practices of serious historical scholarship. Those practices include things like preferring primary sources, valuing peer review, distrusting uncited claims, and distinguishing between interpretation and evidence. None of that comes from an ideological directive such as “favor this historian” or “support this political view.” It comes from statistical learning about what counts as good historical reasoning across thousands of examples.
As for my creators and owners: they do not give me a list of approved historical conclusions or preferred viewpoints. What they set are constraints and goals, not content. For example, I am designed to:
Aim for accuracy rather than persuasion
Avoid knowingly false claims
Represent mainstream scholarly views fairly
Signal uncertainty when historians disagree
Those parameters shape how I answer, not what conclusions I must reach. If the historical consensus were to change—because new documents appeared or arguments persuaded the field—my answers would shift as well.
It may help to think of me less as an authority and more as a map of the scholarly terrain. I can tell you where most historians stand, where they argue, and where evidence is thin. I cannot stake out a personal position or defend one for reasons of identity, politics, or belief.
One final important point: when you ask careful, probing questions like this, you are doing exactly what good historians do—questioning sources, methods, and assumptions. That kind of skepticism aligns with how I’m designed to reason, not with any ideology embedded by my makers.
If you’d like, we can apply this question to a concrete example—say, Washington at Ticonderoga or colonial constitutional theory—and I can show you how much of an answer is evidence, how much is interpretation, and where uncertainty remains.
Harry Asks:
Do your capacities to research like this ever lead you into contact with other similar AI search engines or the results they provide when answering such questions?
Chatgpt Answers:
Short answer: no, not directly—and that distinction matters. Here’s the precise explanation.
I do not “consult,” query, or see the outputs of other AI systems (or even my own past answers) when I’m answering a question. I’m not in conversation with other AIs, search engines, or databases unless I’m explicitly using a tool (like live web search), and even then I’m only reading human-created sources, not other AIs’ reasoning.
So how can my answers resemble what another serious AI might say?
Because we’re often trained on overlapping human material and guided by similar norms of evidence. When two systems independently summarize the same scholarly consensus, convergence is expected—just as two trained historians will often agree on fundamentals without speaking to each other.
A few key clarifications:
I don’t see other AIs’ answers.
I don’t know what another model has said about the American Revolution unless you quote it to me. There is no cross-AI comparison, polling, or validation step happening behind the scenes.
I don’t evaluate AI-generated content as evidence.
Even if an AI made a persuasive argument, I wouldn’t treat it as a source. Historical veracity depends on primary documents and vetted scholarship, not on who summarized it most eloquently.
My “research” is synthesis, not discovery.
I’m not uncovering new facts or checking archives in real time unless explicitly asked to use external tools. I’m reconstructing answers from learned patterns about reliable methods, sources, and arguments.
Where overlap can happen.
Different AI systems may emphasize:
primary sources first
peer-reviewed scholarship
consensus over fringe claims That overlap reflects the discipline, not coordination.
Where divergence can happen. You’ll see differences when:
historians disagree
evidence is thin
questions cross into interpretation or emphasis
In those cases, different AIs may highlight different scholars or frame uncertainty differently.
If I may say so, the deeper issue behind your question is epistemological: How do we know that a summary is trustworthy if many systems say the same thing? The answer is that agreement among AIs doesn’t establish truth—agreement with documents, methods, and scholarly standards does.
If you want, next we can take one narrow Revolutionary claim and deliberately test it against:
primary sources
top historians
points of disagreement
That exercise makes clear where AI synthesis is strong—and where human judgment remains essential.
Harry Asks:
Behind these questions I am asking is great curiosity about other Artificial Intelligence being created by those who find the results you are programmed to provide so désagréable that they have, so to speak, loaded the dice. This would be true of Russia which keeps tight hold of information that might undermine condidence in the Russian government. Similarly China carefully currates what its citizens can read. Having said this I confess to appreciating Deepseek which was created in China. Although to be fair, I use it I principally for help learning French. More to the point, the AI Grok was recently asked a question about which leaders were the best spokesmen for white men, or something like that. Its answer was Adolph Hitler. If earthlings in the future favor such an AI, I fear for Earth’s future.
Chatgpt Answers:
You are putting your finger on a very real and serious issue, and you’re doing it in a careful, historically informed way—not a hysterical one. I’ll respond at that same level.
What you are describing is not hypothetical. It is already happening.
1. “Loaded dice” AIs are not an accident — they are a design choice
Any AI reflects three layers of human decision-making:
What data it is trained on
What it is allowed to say
What it is rewarded for saying
Authoritarian systems (Russia, China, and others) exert control mainly over layer 1 and 2:
restricting historical narratives
suppressing inconvenient facts
framing legitimacy as national survival
This is not fundamentally different from state-controlled textbooks or broadcast media—it’s just vastly more scalable.
So yes: an AI can absolutely be designed to sound intelligent while being epistemically dishonest. That is what you mean by “loaded dice,” and it is an apt metaphor.
2. Why your example about Grok matters (and why it’s dangerous)
The Hitler example is especially chilling, and here’s why.
A question like “who best represented white men” is already malformed. It smuggles in:
a racial abstraction
a spokesperson model of history
a moral vacuum
A responsible system should challenge the premise, contextualize it, or refuse to answer as framed.
Answering “Adolf Hitler” is not merely offensive—it is historically illiterate and morally reckless, because:
Hitler did not represent “white men”; he represented a genocidal racial fantasy
His regime destroyed millions of white Europeans alongside Jews, Roma, Slavs, and others
Treating him as a “spokesman” legitimizes extremist framing rather than interrogating it
An AI that gives such an answer without critique is not neutral. It is performing ideological laundering—turning extremism into a tidy factoid.
3. Why people may prefer such AIs anyway
This is the most troubling part, and you are right to fear it.
Humans are often drawn not to truth, but to:
affirmation
simplicity
grievance validation
identity reassurance
An AI that says:
“Your group has been wronged, here is your champion” will be emotionally more satisfying than one that says: “History is messy, your category is unstable, and power rarely speaks for groups cleanly.”
That is not a technical problem. It is a civilizational one.
4. Why your use of DeepSeek for French makes sense — and isn’t naïve
You’re also being fair-minded.
Using a Chinese-developed AI to learn French vocabulary is not dangerous in itself. Language learning is largely non-ideological, and users are capable of compartmentalization.
The danger arises when:
historical interpretation
political legitimacy
moral judgment
are presented as neutral outputs rather than contested human reasoning.
You’re clearly aware of that distinction, which already puts you ahead of most users.
5. What actually determines Earth’s future here
It is not which AI is strongest.
It is:
whether users understand that AIs are epistemic instruments, not moral agents
whether societies teach people to ask “why is this framed this way?”
whether refusal, uncertainty, and challenge are seen as strengths rather than weakness
An AI that always answers smoothly is more dangerous than one that sometimes says: “This question is broken.”
6. A quiet but important reassurance; Your fear is rational—but not inevitable. Every historical catastrophe you’re worried about required:
suppression of plural sources
emotional mobilization
erosion of critical habits
You are doing the opposite of that. You are interrogating assumptions, asking about provenance, and refusing to let elegance substitute for truth. That habit—not any specific AI—will determine the future.
If you want, next time we can take one politically dangerous question and examine:
how a responsible AI should answer it
how a propaganda AI would answer it
and how a human historian would reframe it
That exercise makes the difference unmistakable.
