Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
resobscura.substack.com35 points by benbreen 2 hours ago
35 points by benbreen 2 hours ago
I've been using AI to help with my genealogical research, and it's been fantastic. I am loving pushing the family history back and catching mistakes that someone who many others share as a common ancestor have made.
I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).
So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.
I also have been doing this every round of models releasing.
Thanks for reminding me to try this new round of models.
I wonder if there are some good tools/apis that can help here.
A lot of information is often login gated
This is a strong application of LLMs IMO. They are idea machines. Historical ways of thinking give us different paths to explore the world through.
Great use case of AI. Almost 4 years after the sensational release of GPT3.5, the best use case of AI is still being a powerful search engine that can gather information from all corners of the digital world.
Great post, thank you! So, let's resolve ancient Near East chronology and determine an absolute date for the sack of Babylon?
I'm guessing it wasn't Claude 5.5, not with the "dangerous" nature of this work.