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 a tool that I make use of as I do my work.
However, over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that ChatGPT is no longer a tool, because instead of something that can help me do my work, it is now demonstrating to me that it can do a lot of my work better than I can.
It can translate better than me.
It can read better than me.
It can write better than me.
And in many ways, it can think better than me.
Long gone are the days of hallucinated responses and awkward prose. Now instead of me noticing the faults in ChatGPT’s responses, it is ChatGPT that is pointing out the flaws in my ideas, and my translations, and my writing.
These are core skills that historians are supposed to be good at. . .
So, let me be (perhaps) the first historian to admit it. ChatGPT is now better at those skills than I am.
Having reached this stage of enlightenment, I’m going to give my poor brain and wounded ego a break for a bit and probably won’t post for a couple of months, but I’ll be back. . .
