Just saw the abstract of a presentation by an economist on how they used LLMs "to identify key themes" in thousands of letters from migrant people in the 19C... 🤦

What happened to subjectivity in research? Why use LLMs? Is it to provide objectivity to the research? That does not exist in social sciences!
Wasn't there another way, even on so big a sample?

I feel it's such an insult to the fact that we were able to preserve this historical material to make it go through a LLM...
#academia