Just like the British band Queen declaring "No synthesizers" on their early albums, I can say "No AI."

No AI tools have been used in the creation of the World History Timeline.*

When I started putting the Timeline together over a decade ago now, Artificial Intelligence, as we know it, did not exist. Once AI tools based on Large Language Models (LLMs) did enter the mainstream, one of the first reactions of many people was to think that they (the AI models) could produce anything you asked for almost instantly. Many people still think this way about AI.

There is no doubt that AI can produce some amazing results. It can, and does, produce amazing errors and factually incorrect results too. And AI will happily present these "facts" alongside actual factually correct data without any easy way for humans to differentiate between the two.

Famously, Microsoft recommends to not trust its own AI when used in conjunction with Excel if you are depending on the data to be reliably accurate!


* A little while ago, I decided to test some AI models, to see if they lived up to the hype. I asked for a very basic list of Names and the Birth Year and Year of Death of 50 famous scientists from various eras and cultures.

And yes, in very little time, the AI model provided the list.

Of course, knowing that AI can produce errors without being aware of them, I fact-checked every date and found that, even though it was a simple request, there were a disturbing number of incorrect dates present in the list.

I also asked for a visual representation in the form of a Timeline. I found what the AI produced to be very visually unappealing, even after multiple attempts.

I did end up including some of the names of the scientists in the World History Timeline, but only after I had fact-checked the details.

Because accuracy and clear presentation are two of the critical criteria in a reliable, trustworthy and useful Timeline, I have therefore refrained from using AI in the creation of the World History Timeline.