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Right, another key thing that historians do is working with important records that have not been digitized. And the vast majority of the world’s records *have not been digitized* and thus do not exist in any format that LLMs/AI can work with.

I think that's a point that will surprise a lot of people. There's a lot of calling the internet capable of accessing "the sum of all human knowledge" and such that I think gives people the impression that any and all records exist online somewhere.

Not really--it's just a dispute over what counts as "human knowledge". What counts is on a spectrum, from "easily accessible by anyone, anytime, anywhere" to "extremely hard to find in an inaccessible archive" to "exists but not archived at all" to "totally lost". Where do you draw the line?

They are telling the truth (as long as you adopt their definition of "human knowledge", which, while contestable, is IMHO reasonable)