AI

Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field?

Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930

Apr 29 • Benjamin Breen

The Secret History of Knocking on Wood

Most of human nature is never written down — and machines can't learn it from text

Feb 24 • Benjamin Breen

What is happening to writing?

"Cognitive debt," Claude Code, and the negative space around AI

Feb 18 • Benjamin Breen

How well can Gemini 3 make a Henry James simulator?

Finally, a benchmark for LLMs with real-world value

Nov 19, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

Can automation help make the humanities more human?

Finding the negative space around machine capabilities is not a new challenge — but it is more important today than ever before in history

Nov 6, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

The Age of Books and the Age of Brainrot

A semi-optimistic take on the future of reading and thinking

Oct 2, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning

The world's most eccentric exam is newly relevant in the age of AI

Aug 13, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery

Serious learning requires friction, frustration... and other humans

Jul 31, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder

Historians are finally having their AI debate

May 7, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI

One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.

Apr 2, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research

A followup to "The leading AI models are now good historians"

Mar 5, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

The familiar loneliness of the Kinetoscope

One other way that the 2020s resemble the 1890s

Feb 5, 2025 • Benjamin Breen

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