This paper explores whether generative AI can produce evidence in historical sciences, suggesting it may generate higher-order and synthetic evidence.
Researchers in history and the historical sciences explore the use of generative AI (GenAI) systems for reconstructing destroyed artifacts. This paper poses a novel question: can such GenAI systems generate evidence that provides new knowledge about the world or can they only produce hypotheses that we might seek evidence for ? Exploring responses to this question, the paper argues that 1) GenAI outputs can at least be understood as higher-order evidence (Parker 2022) and 2) may also produce de novo synthetic evidence.
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Khosrowi et al. (2025) studied this question.
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