The Feverish Library

Or, how (not) to do history with LLMs

In two previous posts on this Substack, my colleagues Jakob Zsambok and Samantha Holder describe our team’s experience using LLMs to generate data on “instability events” in historical polities: rural uprisings, separatist rebellions, coups d’état and so on. The idea was to harness these AI models (and their dubiously acquired training data) to allow us to systematically pinpoint “disintegrative” or crisis phases in historical kingdoms, empires and states.

A medieval English uprising: the priest John Ball makes a speech to Wat Tyler’s rebels during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. This illustration is from a late 15th-century manuscript of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. Source.