GenAI is already useful for historians

I’m still hearing people saying that GenAI is empty hype, comparing it to blockchain and NFTs. The worst dismissals claim that these tools have no real use. While there is a lot of hype around GenAI, there are people using them for real work, including for code generation and interpretation.

An interesting article in the Verge, How AI can make history, looks at how LLMs can investigate historical archives, through Mark Humphries’ research into the diaries of fur trappers. He used LLMs to summarise these archives and to draw out references to topics far more powerfully than a keyword search ever could.

The tool still missed some things, but it performed better than the average graduate student Humphries would normally hire to do this sort of work. And faster. And much, much cheaper. Last November, after OpenAI dropped prices for API calls, he did some rough math. What he would pay a grad student around $16,000 to do over the course of an entire summer, GPT-4 could do for about $70 in around an hour. 

Yes, big companies are overselling GenAI. But, when you strip away the hype, these tools are still incredibly powerful, and people are finding uses for them.