Language models that generate texts on the basis of probabilities are best approached with solid scepticism with regard to factual accuracy, and with a little humour. Jack Krawczyk, who is responsible for the development of the chatbot “Bard” at Google, openly admitted in March 2023: “Bard and ChatGPT are large language models, not knowledge models. […]
“It’s the statistics, stupid”, one could say when it comes to dealing with generative pretrained transformers (GPTs). Yet, we all still have to learn this, only one year after the presentation of ChatGPT. Statistical correlations are key to understanding how stochastic prediction models work and what they are capable of. Put in simple terms, machine […]
In 1798, the Königliche Societät der Wissenschaften (Royal Society of Sciences) in Göttingen published the following prize question in the Reichs-Anzeiger: “How can the advantages that are possible through the wandering of craftsmen be promoted and the disadvantages that occur be prevented?” (“Wie können die Vortheile, welche durch das Wandern der Handwerksgesellen möglich sind, gefördert […]
Openness can be described as one of the logics driving contemporary science and culture. The mechanism behind it is quite simple: Nation-states take a part of their tax revenues and invest them to finance science and culture, in the latter field for example the digitisation of cultural heritage. In return, research organisations and cultural (heritage) […]
It is a well-known fact that machine-learning algorithms exacerbate biases inherent in the datasets on which they were trained. In recent times, this fact has found ample evidence, e.g. in Cathy O’Neill’s book “Weapons of Math Destruction” (2016), in Kate Crawford’s and Trevor Paglen’s “Excavating AI” (2019), or in articles such as “Data and its […]
It could all be so simple: cultural heritage institutions and other public sector bodies provide high-quality data on a large scale and, wherever possible, under a permissive licence such as CC0 or Public Domain Mark 1.0. This is in line with the idea that cultural heritage institutions are funded by taxes, therefore everyone should also […]
Since the release of the ChatGPT dialogue system in November 2022, the societal debate about artificial intelligence (AI) has gained significant momentum and has also reached cultural heritage institutions (such as libraries, archives, and museums). The main challenge is to assess how powerful such large language models (LLMs) are in general, and Generative Pre-trained Transformers […]