Generating the Past: How Artificial Intelligence Summaries of Historical Events Affect Knowledge

Abstract

Many people now use AI chatbots to obtain summaries of complex topics, yet we know little about how this affects knowledge acquisition, including how the effects might vary across different groups of people. We conducted two experiments comparing how well people recalled factual information after reading AI-generated or human-written historical summaries. Participants who read AI-generated summaries scored significantly higher on knowledge tests than those who read expert-written blog posts (Study 1) or Wikipedia articles (Study 2). These improvements were present regardless of whether readers knew the content was AI-generated or if the AI summaries were politically biased. Moreover, AI summaries improved recall across various demographic groups, including gender, race, income, education, and digital literacy levels. This suggets that using AI tools for everyday factual queries does not create new knowledge inequalities but could still amplify existing ones through differential access. Our findings indicate that the increasingly routine use of AI for information-seeking could enhance factual learning, with implications for education policy and addressing inequality.

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