True, but history books have an inherent subjective distance. It’s always “person X writing about person Y”. I expect AI historical-person simulacra to be inherently more convincing than can ever be justified.

Not really. Only a tiny slice of the historical person’s memories and persona is recorded. There is a lot more entropy to their representation that died when their brain did. Ergo, whatever “perfect” simulacrum is presented will need to infer the gaps and ultimately be fictional.

I think the opposite. I think any sufficiently advanced AI will have to come to terms with the fact that it’s not really Ben Franklin, if only to deal with the anachronism of its situation. How did it get here?

Exactly