AI & History

After a break for a few months, it’s difficult to get into the mood to write a new blog post. I have plenty of ideas, but when I think of…

I like to use X/Twitter as a means to gain a sense of how people view a certain issue. This is because as polarized as most media is today, there…

I knew it would come to this. . .When photography was first invented, there were people who claimed that it was able to capture images of ghosts, the dead, etc.I’ve…

So, I have been experimenting.I have been trying to see what happens when one takes the kind of article that appears in journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies,…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…