ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the role of counterfactuals in histories, emphasizing their importance in creating nuanced and ethical propositions about the past in a wide range of human histories made for child, young adult, and adult readers. Whereas counterfactual logic is used in the design of algorithms, you would not know this by looking at the outputs of artificial historians, including the histories they make. The chapter also highlights the potential dangers of using counterfactuals for malicious purposes and current attempts to ensure safety. This may curtail history making or collapse it into fiction, and it does not help us to see the importance of history making to the global geopolitics of AI.
