College Student's "time Travel" AI Experiment
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A college student created an AI model trained on 1800s texts that surprisingly referenced real 1834 London protests, sparking discussion about the model's capabilities and potential biases.
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> On the one hand, this output is not very surprising. AI researchers who create AI language models like the kind that power ChatGPT have known for years that these models can synthesize realistic permutations of information learned from those texts. It's how every AI assistant today works.
> But what makes this episode especially interesting is that a small hobbyist model trained by one man appears to have surprised him by reconstructing a coherent historical moment from scattered references across thousands of documents, connecting a specific year to actual events and figures without being explicitly taught these relationships. Grigorian hadn't intentionally trained the model on 1834 protest documentation; the AI assembled these connections from the ambient patterns in 6.25GB of Victorian-era writing.
- it's not a fine tune or LoRA; he trained the model from scratch
- it's a small model, but he got it to output text that wasn't just plausible, but reflected some understanding of the zeitgeist, based on writings from the period (not descriptions of the zeitgeist)