Electroshocking the Past: Art History and the Political Project of Non-Generative AI

This talk presents material from Sonja Drimmer's current project, "Extracting the Past: How AI Is Stealing History to Rob Our Future." Broadly, the book offers an account of the artificial intelligence industry’s reliance on historical artifacts, the labor of historians, and a perverse recounting of history itself. In this talk, she will focus on non-generative forms of machine learning—computer vision in particular—as both the driving force behind some of the AI industry’s most profitable ventures and the bedrock of the political project that this industry is enabling. She will discuss how art historians working within museums and universities have—wittingly and unwittingly—played an important role in this industry’s development, and how an inordinate focus on generative AI threatens to obscure the now-mundane uses of a technology that is being leveraged to dismantle the foundations of civil society.

Sonja Drimmer is a scholar of medieval European art with expertise in illuminated manuscripts and early print. Before joining the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, she received her BA from Brown University and PhD from Columbia University. Her research is largely concerned with premodern notions of authorship and authority, media theory, book history, reproduction, and the aesthetics and material culture of politics. She maintains a strong interest in historiography and, in particular, how mediation, reproduction, and restoration shape the reception of objects over time. This concern extends to commentary she has written for both public and scholarly venues regarding the incursion of machine learning and artificial intelligence into the humanities, with art history in particular.

Throughout 2025–26, CDH will host six public talks by leading scholars in Cultural Analytics. Open to all, the series invites audiences to explore the histories, theories, and practices that shape the evolving intersection of AI and the humanities.

Since the release of ChatGPT, conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) have generated both excitement and concern across the humanities. Much of the debate has focused on political and ethical questions—bias, labor, environmental impact, and intellectual property—as well as the effects of large language models (LLMs) on teaching and learning. Yet one question remains underexplored: how might AI contribute directly to humanities scholarship?

Modeling Culture is generously funded by an AI Lab Seed grant, with additional support from the Humanities Council, the Princeton Humanities Initiative, and the Center for Information Technology Policy.