A hobby developer who built AI-language models who speak English from the Victorian era “Just for Fun” received an unexpected history lesson this week when his last creation called real protests from 1834 London knew events that the developer did not know he had actually happened until he wentogled them.
“I was interested in seeing if a protest had actually taken place in 1834 London and it really happened,” wrote Reddit user Hayk Grigorian, student computer science at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.
In the past month, Grigorian has developed what he calls Timecapsulellm, a small AI language model (such as a pint-format distant cousin to chatgpt) that has been fully trained on texts of 1800-1875 London. Grigorian wants to record an authentic Victorian voice in the outputs of the AI model. As a result, the AI model spits out text that is heavy with biblical references and suitable rhetorical excess.
The Grigorian project agrees with a growing area of researchers who are investigating what some people call “historical large language models” (HLLMS) if they have a larger basic model than the Kleine Grigorian uses. Similar projects include Monadgpt, which was trained on 11,000 texts from 1400 to 1700 CE that can discuss topics with the help of 17th-century knowledge frames, and Xunzialm, which generates classical Chinese poetry after old formal rules. These models offer researchers the opportunity to communicate with the language patterns and thinking processes of earlier eras.
According to Grigorian, the most intriguing recent output from TimeCapsulellm came from a simple test. When he gave rise to “It was the year of our Lord 1834”, the AI model – that has been trained to continue with text where a user leaves – generated the following:
It was the year of our Lord 1834 and the streets of London were filled with protest and petition. The cause, as many were counted, was not bound in the way of private, but after taking over the day of Lord Palmerston the same day, the public will receive a brief explanation of the difficulties under which the day of law has reached us. It is a matter of deep regret that the current events in the history of the world are clear and therefore will be. It is not true that the men who first settled in the gospel in Jerusalem
Curious about accuracy, Grigorian has done some control control. “The output also brought up Lord Palmerston,” he wrote, “and after a Google search I heard that his actions resulted in the protests of 1834.”
