Various Thoughts on Why I’m Fine with LLMs Being Better Than Me
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 Need to Meditate on the AI Future. . .
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…
Editing, Researching, and (Eventually) Writing with AI
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,…
The Potential of AI Films for Southeast Asian History
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…
AI and the Coming of “Universal Knowledge”
In the past week, I’ve had a few “Wow!” moments related to LLMs, AI, and digital knowledge, and so I thought I’d document that here. The comments I will make…
An Example of How Helpful LLMs are Becoming
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,…
The Decline of the Sense of Scholarly Self-Worth in the Digital and AI Ages
I recently wrote a blog post on how in the 2020s, what we can call activist/progressive scholarship has largely come to dominate in certainly the North American variety of Asian…
Why I like Grok – Knowledge in the AI Age
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…
How Digital-Age Scholarship is Different
All fields are different, but the field I am most active in now (looking at early Southeast Asia through Chinese sources) is very different today than it was just 10…
The Gradual Advance of AI
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…