Look upon my provenance research,
Ye mighty algorithms –
And despair.
Hommage aside, my words are my words. (Including the “em dashes,” dammit!)
I don’t use any Generative AI, chatbots, LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to write, edit, or otherwise “help with” anything on my website.
Nor do I use image-search tools for provenance research (e.g., CoinCabinet, exNummis, acsearch). (See also below on the upstream contributions from AI.)
Here is why I do not:
At one level, I’ll confess, using AI would just take the “sport” out of it. But there’s a more important issue. The value of the research is in the doing.
One benefit of provenance is developing familiarity with the numismatic literature. While it’s important to know that a specific coin was illustrated in a certain catalog, it can be much more valuable to understand the context:
Which collections and catalogs included coins like this? Who were the collectors? What’s worth knowing about their biographies and social networks? Where did their comes from where and where did they go next? Which die-studies cataloged which types? Which hoards did they come from? Which authors and which other texts might have published them as “plate coins”? Were they ever loaned to or exhibited at a museum?
To develop that body of knowledge, one must interact directly with the literature, use it to actively learn about connections between one catalog or book or article and the next, and between collectors, authors, and institutions. With it, one can often anticipate where to find a coin (and where else), often in ways or places inaccessible to current search techonologies.
And, of course, by developing those skills, one better appreciates the historical and intellectual significance of all that “object biography.” How those threads tie together. How they form a coherent narrative about the place of ancient coins (and this coin, specifcially), their scholarship, and the reception of antiquity across historical and cultural contexts.
Authorship & “Upstream” Contributions from AI:
Collecting is an act of authorship, intellectual exploration, and creative expression. My own goal is to understand the relationships between coins, literature, and social actors. Reducing the research to image-matching technology or using AI to write would defeat the raison d’être.
However, like any other scholarly or creative undertaking, forming and publishing a collection is never an entirely individual enterprise. We rely on others not only for the materials themselves, but for our knowledge about them. This now applies to various forms of “AI” research.
Although I don’t directly use them myself, certain indirect “upstream” contributions from LLMs and machine learning are now virtually unavoidable (e.g., in search engine algorithms, library catalogs, and image editing software). When coins are sold with sale histories, these may have been recovered using AI image recognition software.
In most cases, we won’t know exactly how the information was recovered. For one of my coins, though, I am aware that its prior owner (partially) recovered its provenance using AI research. In fact, it was the founder of CoinCabinet, who posted on Facebook about buying, researching, and selling the coin. Fortunately, using my traditional methods, I was still able to find important additional lost provenance he had overlooked. (Otherwise, I wouldv’e have considered it “ineligible” and moved on.) For that coin, the prior AI research is a significant part of its “object biography.” The coin now serves as an illustration of the technology and this moment in the intellectual history of provenance research.
Thus, in curating my collection, my goal is not to exclude all traces of AI research. In fact, as a major emerging numismatic technology, it is essential to record it in my collection. Nonetheless, one principle is unchanged: I strive to appreciate as fully and engage as directly as possible, not only with the coins themselves, but with the history of knowledge and sources about them; and to maintain, as thoroughly as possible, the continuity of human authorship and a focus on the modern significance of ancient coins.