alt Hacker NewsDoes the Venn diagram of people eager to study history and the people stupid enough to use an unreliable chatbot to study history really have that much overlap?
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Depends where you are in your journey. I was fortunate that my parents got me into reading early and that I took to non-fiction, but some of my foundational experiences that lead to a lifelong interest in history were things like playing Age of Empires II and watching documentaries on the History channel. Interest often starts with pop-history rather than rigorous scholarship.
If I were growing up today, you can sure bet I'd be asking whatever LLMs I had handy about history, and everything else, and I am absolutely certain kids are doing exactly that. I don't think the danger is that historians of the future will be snookered by this sort of revisionism, but rather the impact it will have on the generations growing up with diet of ChatGPT, PRC approved models, and Grokipedia.
I would imagine the answer is yes? There are lots of pop history books out there of questionable veracity
Nowadays unfortunately the answer is yes, there is lots of overlap.
Those questions are used as a canary for government manipulation because it's a known topic.
Assuming that the manipulation and censorship only covers a few obvious historical topics and leaves everything else untouched would be very naive.