Main Essay: Oral History Is Not Just Data: Amplifying Humanistic Practices in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

ABSTRACT The rapid development and seemingly ubiquitous integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our everyday lives places oral historians at a perilous crossroads that obligates us to establish clear lines between the humanistic principles that define our work and the colonizing impulses that drive the extractive and exploitative generation of data. AI neither values people nor the data it generates, but we do. How, then, can we resist the tendency to let our interviews become the stuff of algorithms and extractive datasets, which ultimately feed geopolitical instability and the destruction of ecosystems? Drawing on classroom learning as well as community-based and relational work, this roundtable calls on oral historians to protect the integrity of stories, the meanings they generate, the value they hold, and the connections they establish between each of us. This conversation originated in a keynote address that Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki delivered at the annual meeting of the British Oral History Society in the summer of 2023, which then inspired a roundtable that they co-organized for the Oral History Association’s (OHA) “AI in Oral History” virtual symposium in the summer of 2024; participants included the following: Katrina Srigley, Elder John Sawyer, Douglas A. Boyd, Hannah James Louwerse, Graham Smith, and Crystal Mun-hye Baik. These oral historians, whose varied backgrounds, training, and practices are rooted in diverse communities, offered a fruitful entry point into discussing how oral history, as a field, ought to begin to critically address the turn toward AI. Our collective thoughts, which constitute a conversation in progress that continues to evolve alongside AI’s development, are published here.