JFK Facts and the Mary Ferrell Foundation are currently exploring ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) might be deployed to search, sort, and analyze the vast record of President Kennedy’s assassination. With its incredible capacity to synthesize information, AI chatbots seem to have great potential for historical research, especially in the JFK story where many questions remain about how a popular American president was shot dead in broad daylight and no one was ever brought to justice for the crime.
AI’s potential, alas, is not a deliverable.
The AI video firm Synthesia is offering a snippet of a virtual talking head (circulating on Twitter) who declaims about JFK’s assassination. Is she a real person or a CGI robot? The latter I think but who knows. She starts by saying, cryptically, “The future is overrated,” adding “Trust me I should know,” which sure sounds like the prelude to a scam, especially when followed up with a reference to Gerald Posner’s outdated book “Case Closed,” and concluding with this ungrammatical pensee: “The future knows it is Oswald alone.”
Come again, my little avatar? The future isn’t a person or a being so how can it know something? And, if this future-with-a-consciousness is “overrated,” then maybe its knowledge of the JFK story may be overrated too. Or maybe just non-existent.
In this case, AI is merely AI: Authenticated Ignorance.
JFK Facts and the Mary Ferrell Foundation will continue to explore how Large Language Models can assist in understanding the clandestine events culminated publicly on November 22 and the CIA coverup than followed. In recent years, JFK researchers have made a great strides in understanding the role of certain CIA officers in monitoring and manipulating Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing the president. There is more work to do and perhaps AI technologists can help.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation hosts an large, up-to-date, OCR’ed, and clean data set. We have useful prompts derived from years of JFK research. We have a vast international audience eager for JFK news and insights. We’re asking ourselves, “What can AI help us achieve?”
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