The Article below is reprinted from Royal History Society
On 29 September, 2025, the Society hosted a symposium to discuss Artificial Intelligence in history teaching in higher education. The event, held at the University of Edinburgh, brought together 25 historians at a range of career stages, including students and postgraduate researchers, and with differing levels of experience of and engagement with AI technologies and practice in teaching.
The arrival and growing prevalence of powerful generative AI models has created a new environment in which history is taught and studied. For many, the implications of these developments are uncertain and unsettling, while policies provided at the level of a university–where these exist–are often too generic to offer guidance relevant at the disciplinary level, including to history and historians.
The Society’s workshop addressed two main areas. First, in what ways is AI being used, both overtly and covertly, by students and their lecturers; what are the prompts and expectations for use; and what are the implications of this–positive and negative–for history teaching? Second, what might historians require to help approach and navigate an environment in which AI is now an established element; and what role could organisations like the the Royal Historical Society play in developing this guidance and in what format given the rapid changes in this field?
Attendees were also invited to review examples of existing guidance on AI within teaching in higher education and to recommend reading on the subject of particular relevance to historians. As part of the Society’s provision of resources relating to ‘History, Historians and AI’, these guides and readings have now been added to the Society’s rolling bibliography of materials relating to this subject.
Members of the RHS Council, who led the symposium, will now reflect on the insights, concerns and recommendations of those in Edinburgh who provided an initial conspectus of experience and opinion. This will include how the Society best supports those who teach history in the context of Gen AI.
