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Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction – The Stone and the Shell

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Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.

Language models have been compared to parrots, but the bigger danger is that they turn people into parrots. A student who asks for “a paper about Middlemarch, ” for instance, will get a pastiche loosely based on many things in the model’s training set. This may not count as plagiarism, but it won’t produce anything new. But there are ways to use language models actively and creatively. We can select evidence to be analyzed, put it in a prompt, and specify the questions to be asked. Used this way, language models can create new knowledge that didn’t exist when they

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