Sunday, April 02, 2023

What Will ChatGpt Do for History?

 Discussing with my cousin the pros and cons of a decision on what to write caused me to reflect on ChatGpt, and how it might change historiography.

Some thoughts:

  1. these days everyone is writing something, whether it's on social media or memoirs published through Amazon's KDP or whatever. Some of the material represent a minute-by-minute record of events, both significant and insignificant 
  2. the cost of storage keeps dropping.
  3. gradually or rapidly everything written in the past which has survived is being digitized and stored on media
  4. 1-3 mean that historians have much more material to work with and from, but the task of finding relevant source records and assimilating their content is becoming impossible.
  5. the advent of ChatGpt will provide historians with an invaluable, if dangeroous, aid to find relevant records and the ability to get summaries of the results--a tireless research assistant.

  1. To the extent that materials 


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