Using AI to Understand the Thoughts of the Dead

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

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/ E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Jeff DelViscio with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.
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0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. There's been a lot of hype around artificial intelligence
0:34.8	lately. Some companies want us to believe that machine learning is powerful enough to practically tell us
0:40.8	the future.
0:42.1	But what about using AI to explore the past and even talk to members of long-dead civilizations?
0:49.4	For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
0:52.6	My guest today is Michael Varnum, social psychology
0:55.5	area head and associate professor at Arizona State University. He's one of the co-authors of a recent
1:01.1	opinion paper that proposes a somewhat spooky new use for tools like chat GPT. Michael, thanks so much
1:08.4	for joining us today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
1:11.6	So you have this new paper, kind of a ghost in the machine sort of vibe.
1:18.6	Tell us a little bit about the problem you're setting out to solve.
1:24.6	Yeah, so I've been interested in thinking about cultural change for some time and I've done a lot
1:29.8	of work in that area.
1:31.3	But we run into some limitations when we're trying to get insight into the mentality or behavior
1:36.5	of folks who are no longer with us.
1:38.9	We obviously don't have time machines, right?
1:41.5	We can't bring the dead back and ask them to participate in our experiments or run them
	...

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