Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

I recently wrote a brief post in which I admitted something that still feels a little strange to say out loud: LLMs can now do much of the work that I do as a historian better than I can. They can read faster, write more fluently, translate more accurately, and...

For the past few months, I have been working heavily with ChatGPT (the paid version). It’s open all day long as I work on various things, and I repeatedly turn to it for various tasks and queries. Up until recently, that is how I have seen and used LLMs, as...

Over the past few years, I’ve seen the same pattern repeated over and over regarding statements made about LLMs. Someone will say something about the capabilities of a given LLM, and then someone else will respond with a dismissive comment to the effect of, “Well, I just ask ChatGPT, Claude,...

In the early 2000s, when I started teaching, I developed a course called “The World of the Mekong” that was about the histories of what is now Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos (with some Burma and southern Vietnam as well). My development of that course coincided with a kind of “golden...

I’m in the process of translating a fourteenth-century text, Wang Dayuan’s 1349 Brief Treatise on the Island Barbarians (Daoyi zhilue 島夷誌略), and I do this by putting passages in Grok, and then checking its translations. Today I was working on a section on “Jiaozhi,” the area of the Red River...

When it comes to LLMs, I have always had a positive view of Grok. The other day, I asked the free version of Grok using its “thinking” mode the following question: Who are the scholars who have argued that Shepo/She-p’o 闍婆 was on the Malay Peninsula? Shepo is the name...

When technology advances gradually, we tend to not fully appreciate the scale of the transformation that it brings. This is because we adapt to its gradual changes, and lose track of how far those changes have moved us away from the place we were before the technology emerged. I saw...

On October 27, 2025, Elon Musk’s company xAI released the first version (version 0.1) of an alternative to Wikipedia, called Grokipedia. It appears that the creation of Grokipedia was the result of an offhand comment made at an event Musk participated in this past September, the All In Summit. At...

When I was working in the US, I never got an email from a predatory/scam journal. Then I went to work at a university in Southeast Asia, and I immediately started to get emails from such journals on a regular basis. I got the above email because I tried to...

I see a lot of academics brushing off AI, thinking that it’s not a threat. How do they reach that conclusion? As far as I can tell, in many cases they go on free versions of AI platforms, like ChatGPT, try a few things out, get back some hallucinations, and...

The other day an opinion piece from The Conversation popped up in my news feed with the title, “Some unis are moving away from in-person lectures. Here’s why that’s not such a bad thing.” This piece begins by referencing recent events in Australia. In particular, students and some staff have...

The other day, I went into a bookstore. There was a section on “classics,” which was essentially a section of works of nineteenth and twentieth century literature. I saw volume after volume of books I’d read before in my youth, from The Brothers Karamazov to The Plague, and as I...

A few years ago, I used to teach a session on “writing a literature review” for a general “methods” course that was offered to incoming graduate students in various humanities and social sciences field. I always found teaching this somewhat nonsensical because 1) if you read scholarship, you can see...

I have been arguing that History cannot survive AI, and some people have been offering contending views, such as the idea that AI can’t do certain things that certain historians can. I agree, but I still think that History is toast. Let me explain. I do not see evidence that...

The American Historical Association has issued some “Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education.” If you have read any of my posts on the future (or what I see as the lack thereof) of the History profession in the AI age and think that I am being alarmist, then...

I have been thinking about books and reading as we enter the AI/LLM age. There are a couple of books that were hugely influential when I was a graduate student in the 1990s: Edward Said’s Orientalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. These books were considered “essential reading.” Edward Said’s 1978...

There is a new study that came out recently called “Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI.” This study was carried out by a group of Microsoft researchers and the purpose of the study was to investigate how people are actually using generative AI, and to try...

A little over a year ago, I started learning about AI image generation. There are a lot of tools for creating AI images. Perhaps the most popular is Midjourney. You have to pay for Midjourney, but it produces very high-quality images without the need to know much about what you...

AI filmmaking is still in its infancy, but it is developing very rapidly. As a historian, I would like to be able to use AI to bring the past to life, and video is one way to do this. However, at the moment, it is still very difficult. To make...

I came across the above picture in the British Colonial Office archives. It is of Chinese miners in the early twentieth century in Borneo at a place called “Lobang Buaya,” which means “crocodile pit.” That does not sound like a safe place to be mining, and looking at the blurry...

Just about a year ago, I wrote a blog post in which I talked about ways in which AI can make life exciting and productive for historians. It was an optimistic perspective on the potential of AI, and I still feel the same way about using AI in my own...