Classifying Rabelais’s Underworld With the Bureau of Labor Statistics

One of the texts I had the most fun exploring with large language models is the 16th century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by French monk turned satirist, François Rabelais. I’ve found the translation of these books available on Project Gutenberg to be a rich source of challenging prompts, because they are full of elaborate wordplay, and a Renaissance frame of reference that does not fit neatly into modern categories.

They are also really funny, with a vulgar sense of humor that rivals the shock value of anything you might see on South Park. For example, in a chapter titled “How Epistemon, who had his head cut off, was finely healed by Panurge, and of the news which he brought from the devils, and of the damned people in hell,” the tutor Epistemon is resurrected after another character stitches his decapitated head back onto his body. The first sign that this medical procedure has worked is when Epistemon “lets a great household fart.” In Rabelais, it is the lower bodily stratum that is the source of life (and most of his jokes).

After this resurrection, Epistemon shares with his companions what he saw during his brief tour of the underworld. He recounts a procession of famous figures from history and mythology as being assigned a variety of humble, menial occupations in the afterlife:

…Their estate and condition of living is but only changed after a very strange manner; for I saw Alexander the Great there amending and patching on clouts upon old breeches and stockings, whereby he got but a very poor living.

Xerxes was a crier of mustard. Romulus, a salter and patcher of pattens. Numa, a nailsmith. Tarquin, a porter. Piso, a clownish swain. Sylla, a ferryman. Cyrus, a cowherd. Themistocles, a glass-maker. Epaminondas, a maker of mirrors or looking-glasses. Brutus and Cassius, surveyors or measurers of land. Demosthenes, a vine-dresser. Cicero, a fire-kindler..

Epistomone goes on to name over 90 figures, including Roman emperors, popes, mythological heroes, and knights of medieval romance. Rabelais’s novels are full of long, absurd lists like this one, and in my work on RLHF projects, I’ve found they are great material for categorization prompts. For this passage, I wanted to see how well LLMs could classify the figures in Rabelais underworld using structured categories: specifically the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The SOC system is a statistical standard established by the U.S. federal government for classifying all occupations in which work is performed for pay or profit. I sent Rabelais’s list of underworld occupations to three large language models (Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT) and asked each to classify every figure’s job using the SOC system.

Using a federal statistical standard to classify this text allows for a quantitative analysis of the workforce in Rabelais’s underworld. It also makes it possible to compare it to the U.S. workforce in 2024 using data from the BLS and other sources that use the SOC system.

The results show what you might expect: the workforce in Rabelais’s underworld is underpaid and overrepresented in occupations with unpleasant working conditions. I created a slide deck with interactive visualizations summarizing these results, as well as a dashboard where you can explore the results (and BLS data more broadly) for yourself.