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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 us the future.

But what about using AI to explore the past and even talk to members of long dead civilizations?

For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman. My guest today is Michael Varnum, social psychology area head and associate professor at Arizona State University. He's one of

the co-authors of a recent opinion paper that proposes a somewhat spooky new use for tools like

chat GPT. Michael, thanks so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

So you have this new paper, kind of a ghost in the machine sort of vibe. Tell us a little bit

about the problem you're setting out to solve. Yeah. So I've been interested in thinking about cultural change for some time and I've done a lot of

work in that area.

But we run into some limitations when we're trying to get insight into the mentality or

behavior of folks who are no longer with us.

We obviously don't have time machines.

We can't bring the dead back and ask

them to participate in our experiments or run them through economic games. And so typically

what folks like me have to do is use rather indirect proxies, right? Maybe we get archival data

on things like marriage and divorce or crimes, or we look at cultural products,

like the language folks used in books and we try to infer what kinds of values people

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