Like millions of other people, the first thing Mark Humphries did with ChatGPT when it was released in late 2022 was ask it to perform parlor tricks, like writing poetry in the style of Bob Dylan — which, while very impressive, did not seem particularly useful to him, a historian studying the 18th-century fur trade. But Humphries, a 43-year-old professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, had long been interested in applying artificial intelligence to his work. He was…
What AI can do for historians
