Speaker: Dr Frédéric Clavert, University of Luxembourg
Abstract: Chatbots are based on language models trained in various ways using vast amounts of training data, which, from a historian’s perspective, can be seen as a form of archive. Chatbots users enter prompts to obtain responses in the form of text, images, videos, etc. These outputs, just like the prompts themselves, can also be regarded as primary sources for the social sciences, both today and in the future. Using prompts that refer to the historical past as an example, this presentation will attempt to explore how a historian might make use of some of these sources, and by what methods.
Bio: Frédéric Clavert is an assistant professor at the C2DH (University of Luxembourg), where he heads the European History Research Group. Having studied political science and the history of international relations at the University of Strasbourg, his early research focused on the monetary policy of the Third Reich. He then gradually turned his attention to the study of online memory phenomena on the one hand, and historians’ relationships with their primary sources in the digital age on the other. He recently co-edited the Memory Studies Review special issue ‘Artificial Intelligence and Collective Memory’ with Sarah Gensburger (CNRS / Sciences Po) and, with Caroline Muller as lead author, Écrire l’Histoire. Gestes et expériences à l’ère numérique.