3 ms·
Are LLMs good historians? Of course not. These types of articles always have some click/rage-bait title declaring AI supremacy at whatever task. I have used Cha
by fumeux_fume 2y ago
Are LLMs good historians? Of course not. These types of articles always have some click/rage-bait title declaring AI supremacy at whatever task. I have used ChatGPT 4o to help translate old high German from broadsides printed in the 15-16th centuries into English and it seems to work pretty well. I don't think I'm doing serious ground-breaking research, but I feel like LLMs open doors and expand access to many things that were once completely locked without specialized knowledge.
- dang 2y agoOk, I've replaced the title above with more representative language from the article.
- p3rls 2y agoLLMs are trained on far too many reddit posts and top 12 kangs of ancient history type blogs to even contend with wikipedia for anything beyond surface level. Thucydidean-level insights? Forget it.
- astrange 2y ago"Training on" a website doesn't mean the output will agree with the website. (eg: imagine pretraining where some of the documents are prepended with a "this is a bad example" token.)
- p3rls 2y agoI just mean the format and topics. When I use o1, it's great for things like calculating square mile comparisons based on your uploaded map of tribes or translating script like the OP's example, but as far as history itself goes, like drawing inferences and making sense of primary sources-- not so much. Ask a question about anything in-depth and it feels like you're interacting with Buzzfeed and not Gibbon.