Using AI to Understand the Thoughts of the Dead

Writings and records are how we understand long-gone civilizations
without being able to interact with ancient peoples. A recent
opinion paper suggested we could feed chatbots writings from the
past to simulate ancient participants for social psychology
studies. Similar survey experiments with modern participant data
closely matched the outcomes of the real people they were based on.
We speak with the opinion paper’s co-author Michael Varnum, an
associate professor at Arizona State University, about what the
limits of this spooky proposal are and what the ghosts of cultures
past could teach us today.  Recommended reading: “Large
Language Models Based on Historical Text Could Offer Informative
Tools for Behavioral Science,” by Michael E. W. Varnum et al., in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 121, No.
42, Article No.  e2407639121; October 9, 2024
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407639121  Inside the
AI Competition That Decoded an Ancient Herculaneum Scroll
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inside-the-ai-competition-that-decoded-an-ancient-scroll-and-changed/ 
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