Social psychologists could turn artificial-intelligence-powered tools like ChatGPT on to writings from past cultures. Will this help us study ancient civilizations?
There’s been a lot of hype around artificial intelligence lately. Some companies want us to believe that machine learning is powerful enough to practically tell the future. But what about using AI to explore the past—and talk to members of long-dead civilizations?I’m Rachel Feltman. My guest today is Michael Varnum, social psychology area head and associate professor at Arizona State University.
What would be amazing is if we could actually get the kind of data we get from folks today, just from, say, you know, ancient Romans or Vikings or medieval Persians. And one thing that really excited me in the past year or two is folks started to realize that you could simulate at least modern participants with programs like ChatGPT and surprisingly, and I think excitingly, replicate a whole host of classic effects in the behavioral sciences.
So so far, to my knowledge, no one has run these kind of fine-tuned models through modern experiments or surveys, really, but I’m guessing that’s going to start happening soon, and I’m really excited to see what folks find.Yeah. So one thing that came to mind when I was reading your paper was the inherent bias we see in the fossil record.
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