How tenure should be granted, circa 2024
Not just on the basis of what you publish, but on what you contribute to the major AI models. So if you go to a major archive and, in some manner, turn it into AI-readable form, that should count for a good deal. It is no worse than publishing a significant article, though of course depending on the quality of the archive. As it stands today, you basically would get no credit for that. You would instead be expected to turn the archive into articles or a book, even if that meant unearthing far less data for the AIs. Turning data into books takes a long time — is that always what humans should be doing?
Articles still count under this standard, as jstor seems to be in the literary “diet” of the major AI models. Wikipedia contributions should count for tenure, and any “hard for the AI to access data set” should count for all the more. Soon it won’t much matter whether humans read your data contribution, as long as the AIs do.
