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Someone who knows a lot of history is a history buff. A historian works with (and may even seek out in musty rooms) primary and secondary sources to produce no
by abathur 2y ago
Someone who knows a lot of history is a history buff.
A historian works with (and may even seek out in musty rooms) primary and secondary sources to produce novel research and interpretation.
An AI is at best limited to ~reading sources that human historians/archivists/librarians have already identified and digitized.
Certainly value to be had here wrt to finding needles in and making sense of already-digitized historical records, but that's more like a research assistant.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoA significant amount of historical work is re-analyzing existing, known material rather than seeking out novel sources. I do know some people working in classical literature that have been testing LLMs against untranslated sources and finding them perform reasonably well. It's completely within the scope of possibility to imagine them becoming more useful for academic work over time.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago> Certainly value to be had here I don't agree. You won't cite an LLM in an academic paper as a source (since it's unverifiable and not reproducible), and claiming than an LLM's result is your own original would be fraud. So unless you never plan on publishing anything ever, what's the point?
- yannis 2y agoYes it is more like a research assistant. The "novel research and interpretation " part is your own synthesis, deserving to be published or awarded a degree and a research assistant can save you a lot of time. As AI companies throw more money into their training data or tools become available for researchers to easily enhance this, by uploading their own data the answers will become more "accurate" and more detailed.