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AI Analysis of George Eliot's Fiction

Chapter Summaries with ChatGPT

In Fall 2023, the computer science students on the George Eliot Archive team, led by graduate student Yuxiang Chen, began experimenting with the public and premium versions of OpenAI’s large language model to see what it could tell us about Eliot’s works. Results were riddled with errors until we uploaded the texts chapter by chapter (due to token limits), then prompted the LLM for summaries, character names, and settings from only the text provided. We even asked for “key quotations,” with fascinating results—most predictable but some surprisingly insightful.