Chatting with the Bergier Report. An experiment with ChatGPT

NB: Due to impediments on the part of speakers, the event has to be postponed in January 2025.

Is it really helpful to upload history books into ChatGPT and then have a dialogue with them as one would with an expert? Is ChatGPT capable of accurately conveying information contained in several books? Can it be used as a reading aid for historians?

To try to answer these questions, infoclio.ch is offering an experiment ahead of its annual colloquium, "Second World War. A Changing Memory." This experiment, which is open to the public, will involve a dialogue with ChatGPT.

The experiment consists of uploading the 25 volumes of the Swiss Independent Expert Commission on the Second World War (Bergier Commission) — totaling over 11,000 pages — into a personalized GPT, and then conducting a dialogue with this GPT in the presence of content experts of the reports on one hand, and experts in language models such as ChatGPT on the other.

The experts participating in this experiment are:

• Dominique Dirlewanger, historian and teacher.
• Tobias Hodel, professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Bern.
• Mykola Makhortykh, researcher in Media Studies at the University of Bern.
• Marc Perrenoud, historian and former scientific advisor of the Swiss Independent Expert Commission on the Second World War.

Place:

Online, on Zoom.

Date:

Tuesday, October 29, 2024, from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM.

[21.10.2024] The event has been postponed until January 2025. The new date will be announced as soon as possible.