Questions Through Time, with ChatGPT: Part I

Orwell | Dali | McKenna | Carlin | Nietzsche

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The hyped up language model that is ChatGPT offers something of a unique opportunity to assume the perspective of minds no longer with us, minds whose thoughts and beliefs are trapped to the relative eternity of the cyber ethers.

As you’ll see, the perspectives aren’t exactly perfect, but I’d argue that it’s on par with (if not better than) those which can be extracted from many modern historians with potentially contaminated belief systems (say, via tenure concerns or political ideologies).

Per what ChatGPT divulged to me in a related article:

“To give you a better idea of the scale of the data that I have access to, here are some approximate numbers:

The internet contains billions of web pages, and my training data includes over 45 terabytes of web pages. To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to around 4.5 million copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

My training data includes text from over 10 million books, which would be equivalent to a library with tens of thousands of shelves filled with books.”

- C.GPT.4

I challenge any historian to showcase that kind of book collection.

ChatGPT.4 may not exactly blow us away at this time, but it’s a first (technically fourth) big step towards an eventual destination that will allow us some frightfully uncanny views into the minds of those that we still hold in high regard today.

Here’s the first part in a continuing series that’ll undoubtedly get better and better with each new…