Editors’ Summary: In “The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI,” published on Active History, Jacob Polay, Chloë Farr, and Jessica Jack critique talkie, a language model trained exclusively on pre-1931 English-language print sources and marketed as both a forecasting experiment and a chatbot “from 1930.” The authors argue that its training corpus—dominated by white, male, elite voices and drawn from easily available digitized repositories—produces bigoted outputs presented as historical truth, while the team’s refusal of post-training guardrails and disregard for archival expertise subverts decades of humanities work expanding the archive. They call for releasing the training data and co-designing such models with historians and archivists.
Editors’ Choice: The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI
