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FB Kolloq SoSe2026/27: Jamie Cummins

„How (Not) To Use AI in Research”

Veranstaltungsdaten

Dr. Jamie Cummins, Universität Bern, Schweiz
„How (Not) To Use AI in Research”

Generative large language models are seeing an explosion of use in the social sciences, driven by their accessibility, easy of use, and capacity for application to an unprecedented range of tasks. However, the accessibility of LLMs obscures the fact that there are a range of important decisions that must be made when using them, and these decisions can dramatically affect output. Further, many of these decisions are gated off from users in commercial chat interfaces, and other features of these interfaces (e.g., the chat context) lead to erroneous mental models of how LLMs “work”. In this talk, I will describe some of these issues, as well as other pitfalls related to the use and interpretation of language models applied to social science research questions. I will describe how we can more rigorously and systematically apply and evaluate LLMs in research.