How AI Could Plug Humanity Into The Teaching Of History

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — There is a general crisis in teaching and more particularly, in the history profession. Conversations in the teachers’ lounge confirm that there are economic, symbolic and epistemological reasons, compounded by aggressive competition from AI. When my colleague Magdalena Candioti warned about its risks to historical thinking, she was pointing to a real danger: the illusion of reducing the past to processable data, and prefabricated stories. 

But there is another, more subtle and underlying threat: our own complicity in the mechanization of the profession. For decades, academic professionalization turned us into producers of papers evaluated by impact indicators, or “knowledge officials” measuring their prestige in references rather than ideas. The bitter paradox is, just when machines are threatening to replace us, we find out we were already functioning like them. 

Faced with this, AI is not just a technical challenge but also an existential question. Will we accept being reduced to algorithm correctors, or will we use this crisis to recover what we never should have lost?

Reclaiming our human condition

Because if there’s one thing a machine cannot imitate — at least not genuinely — it’s that spark of imagination that turns data into stories, and archives into human dramas. Accepting the challenge of creating and narrating against the grain isn’t just about defending our place as historians: it’s about reclaiming our human condition in a world that seeks to automate everything.

Historical imagination was never a luxury. It’s the tool that allows us to listen to muffled voices, reconstruct the nuances of an era, and build bridges between what was and what we are. An algorithm can identify patterns in 18th century records but cannot ask itself what those merchants dreamed about on their winter nights. We can.

The teaching of history is, above all, a tool for imagining futures.

And it is there, in that space between evidence and conjecture, that history reveals its subversive power: reminding us that the past is not fixed, but is rewritten with each generation that dares to interrogate it from its present.

AI, ironically, could free us from our own chains. If it takes charge of the repetitive tasks — source research, transcription, cross-referencing – why not use that time to return to the big questions or bold stories sidelined by bureaucratized academia? The challenge is not technical, but political: to write as if the future of our humanity depended on it. Because, in a way, it does.

Thinking more freely

This juncture is an opportunity disguised as a threat. AI forces us to choose: between being its assistants or reinventing ourselves as tellers of stories only humans could tell. Choosing the latter is more than defending a profession; it is to insist that this experience has dimensions — like doubt, empathy, contradiction, beauty — that cannot be codified. It is to affirm that narrating the past is among the last, radically human gestures. 

Ultimately, the problem was never just the machine, but what we were willing to sacrifice to fit into systems that rewarded efficiency over depth. Now that those same systems are making us expendable, we have the chance to return to what we were always meant to be: not processors of information, but weavers of meaning, stubborn storytellers and, well, human beings.. 

Resisting today means creating more boldly, narrating with greater fury, and thinking more freely. Because we are not just saving our profession in this act of rebellious imagination, but reaffirming ourselves as beings able to question, doubt and dream in a world determined to turn us into extensions of its machines. The teaching of history is, above all, a tool for imagining futures. History has always been a territory of struggle, and this, perhaps, is ours.