From Charters to ChatGPT: Why the Ancient Science of Diplomatics is Crucial for AI Governance
Why learned to love diplomatics again
From Manuscript to Machine Learning: Why the Science of Diplomatics is Crucial for AI Governance
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes ubiquitous, a new challenge looms over everything we create, share, and trust: the authenticity and reliability of information. As AI systems begin to autonomously generate contracts, write reports, make critical decisions, and even create synthetic media, we face a foundational crisis of trust. How can we verify a document created not by a person in an office, but by an algorithm in the cloud? How do we hold an automated system accountable?
The answer, surprisingly, may lie not in a futuristic algorithm but in a centuries-old discipline. Diplomatics, the science originally developed to authenticate medieval charters and papal bulls, is experiencing a profound and necessary revival. It provides the rigorous intellectual framework needed to navigate the treacherous landscape of digital trust and forms a cornerstone for effective AI governance. A transition from Charters to ChatGPT.
What is Diplomatics?
At its core, diplomatics is the critical analysis of documents. It is not about international relations, but about the "diploma", the formal record. For centuries, scholars have used it to determine if a document is genuine by scrutinising its creation, form, and transmission. They did this by examining two types of characteristics:
Intrinsic Elements: The content and structure of the document itself. This includes the language used, the legal formulas, the named persons and dates, and the logical flow of the text (the dispositio). Essentially, what the document says and how it says it.
Extrinsic Elements: The physical and formal attributes of the document. This includes the parchment or paper used, the ink, the handwriting style (scriptio), the seals, and the signatures. These elements provide clues about how and by whom the document was physically created.
Crucially, diplomatics connects these elements to the procedural context, i.e. the administrative or legal act (actio) that caused the document to be created. A valid royal charter wasn't just words on parchment; it was the product of a specific, authorized procedure within the royal chancery. Diplomatics seeks to reconstruct this procedure to verify the record, it is the process, not the output that is important, exactly as we now experience in the digital world, it’s the journey of becoming th provides trust, not just the final output.
The Digital Translation: Diplomatics in the Age of AI
The principles of diplomatics translate with surprising precision to the challenges of AI-generated information. The discipline provides a ready-made model for establishing context, understanding semantic value, and identifying the features that confer authenticity upon a digital record.
Extrinsic Value is Now Metadata and Provenance
In the digital realm, the extrinsic elements of a document are no longer physical but logical and procedural. Metadata becomes the new seal and signature.
Seals and Signatures become cryptographic hashes and digital signatures, which verify integrity and authorship.
Parchment and Ink become the file format, data structure, and software environment in which the record was created.
The Scribe’s Hand becomes the specific AI model and its version number.
Diplomatics teaches us to scrutinise this "digital wrapper." The analysis of metadata integrity, creation logs, access history, and API calls is a direct modern application of examining a document's extrinsic features. This is often referred to as algorithmic provenance, a clear record of the what, when, and how of the record's creation.
Intrinsic Value is Semantic and Structural Integrity
The intrinsic analysis of an AI's output involves assessing the content itself. Does an AI-generated legal summary use appropriate legal terminology? Does a financial report generated by an algorithm follow accepted accounting principles? This goes beyond a simple check for factual accuracy. It is a structural and semantic analysis to determine if the record is coherent and fit for its stated purpose, just as a medievalist would check if a charter contained the correct royal titles and legal clauses for its time.
Procedural Context is the Digital Chain of Custody
This is where diplomatics becomes most vital for AI governance. An AI system doesn't act in a vacuum. Its outputs are triggered by specific events, governed by programmed rules, and executed within a complex technological system. Reconstructing this procedural context is paramount for accountability.
Diplomatics provides the framework for asking the critical questions:
What event triggered this automated decision? (e.g., the submission of a loan application via an API).
Under what institutional rules did the system operate? (e.g., the programmed business logic and risk parameters).
Who or what had the authority to create this record? (e.g., was it the production version of the loan-adjudication AI, or a test version?).
By mapping these decision trails across distributed cloud systems and microservices, we establish a digital chain of custody. This is essential for the legal admissibility of AI-generated evidence and for auditing the system’s compliance with fairness and transparency regulations.
Why is Diplomatics Suddenly So Crucial?
The relevance of diplomatics has exploded for three key reasons:
The Proliferation of "Unsigned" Records: AI systems are generating millions of records that lack any traditional human author or sign-off. Diplomatics provides the methods to redefine authenticity for these machine-generated outputs, and sets the scene for watermarking or other seals of evidentiality.
The Rise of Synthetic Media and Deepfakes: In an environment polluted by sophisticated forgeries, a rigorous, evidence-based methodology is our best defense. Diplomatics offers a systematic way to differentiate between authentic records and malicious fabrications by examining their provenance and contextual integrity.
The Mandate for AI Explainability and Accountability: AI governance frameworks and regulations (like the EU's AI Act) demand transparency and the ability to audit automated decisions. Diplomatics provides the intellectual scaffolding to conduct these audits, allowing us to evaluate not just what a decision was, but whether the procedure that created the record of that decision was valid, reliable, and compliant.
From Theory to Practice: A Tool for the Future
Far from being a dusty academic curiosity, diplomatics is being operationalised as a vital 21st-century tool. System architects are using its principles to design AI systems that are "trustworthy by design," ensuring they automatically capture the necessary procedural and technical metadata. Auditors are using its framework to assess algorithmic accountability. Lawyers are using its logic to argue for the reliability of digital evidence in court.
As we delegate ever more responsibility to artificial intelligence, we cannot afford to lose our grip on the authenticity of the world it helps create. By reviving and retooling the ancient art of diplomatics, we are not looking backward. We are equipping ourselves with a time-tested intellectual toolkit to scrutinize, verify, and ultimately trust the digital records of the future.