Ian Miell
Partner, Container Solutions
TALK
A Week's Work in Six Hours: How LLMs will (Probably) Revolutionise the Study of Humanities… But Not Yet
This talk shares my experience using both private and public Large Language Models (LLMs) to write an undergraduate history essay that I originally tackled nearly 30 years ago. The essay, which explores the question of "How far was New Liberalism a departure from the Old Liberalism?", serves as a case study to examine the impact of AI assistance on historical research and essay writing.
There were rules to this task: No peeking at the original essay No reading any of the suggested material, except to find references.
To achieve this I used various tools, including ChatGPT, Llama2, an old Dell Xeon tower PC, some python and good old-fashioned grep. The talk will cover what I learned about how humanities study is both being revolutionised by LLMs, and how in many ways nothing has really changed. It will also cover what I learned after I publishing a blog post on it that made the front page of HackerNews from others about how complacent faculties around the world are about what's coming.
Thursday, 24 October, 14:00
Duration: 30 minutes
Track: AI in Action: Real World Stories
About the speaker
Ian Miell has over twenty-five years' experience in software consulting on, writing, running, architecting, and maintaining software and infrastructure for dozens of businesses from large to small. He now focusses on unblocking organisations from making technical changes from the top to the bottom of the tech and management stacks. He has written the book 'Docker in Practice' (published by Manning), 'Learn Bash the Hard Way', 'Learn Git the Hard Way', and 'Learn Terraform the Hard Way' (published on Leanpub), as well as various training courses for O'Reilly Media and others.
He blogs about his experiences at https://zwischenzugs.com, and works for https://www.container-solutions.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-miell-694496/
Website: https://zwischenzugs.com
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