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tamhs.bsky.social
@tamhs.bsky.social
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miriamposner.com
This made me cheer. It gets directly at a problem I’ve often noticed: people don’t fundamentally understand what a historian *does*.
Ethical: There is a particular paradox that makes Al essentially useless as a tool for studying history. The entire point of what we do as historians is to look for untold stories...elements of the history of mankind that are novel and unexpected. There is a fundamental epistemological disjuncture between what PhD-holding historians do and what ChatGPT and its ilk do: the former meticulously, purposefully, and rigorously comb through a mountain of human-curated documents looking - Continued to Next Page for revealing details that diverge from the baseline, offer indications of cultural shift, or elements humanity embedded in seemingly mundane activities; the latter processes terabytes of machine-harvested data in order to predict what will be the most likely next token in a string, and when these tokens are words they may or may not result in a grammatically coherent sentence.
March 22, 2025 at 5:59 PM