A hobbyist developer who builds AI language models that speak Victorian English “Just For Fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t know actually happened until he looked them up.
“I was interested to see if there was actually a protest in London in 1834, and there was,” wrote Reddit user Hayk Grigorian, who is a computer science student at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.
For the past month, Grigoryan has been developing what he calls Timecapsulellm , a small AI language model (like a pint-sized distant cousin to Chatgpt) trained entirely on texts from 1800 to 1875 London. Grigoryan wants to capture an authentic Victorian voice in the AI model’s output. As a result, the AI model ends up churning out text that’s heavy on biblical references and period-appropriate rhetorical excess.
The Grigorian project joins a growing field of researchers studying what some call “ Historically Large Language Models ” (HLLMS) that have a larger base model than the small Grigorian. Similar projects include Monadgpt , which was trained on 11,000 texts from 1400 to 1700 CE, which can discuss topics using 17th-century knowledge frameworks, and Xunziallm, which generates classical Chinese poetry following ancient formal rules. These models offer researchers the ability to interact with linguistic models from past eras.
According to Grigorian, the TimeCapsulellm’s most intriguing recent output came from a simple test. When he prompted it with “it was the year of our Lord 1834,” the AI model, which is trained to continue text from wherever the user leaves off, generated:
It was the year of our Lord 1834, and the streets of London were filled with protest and petition. The cause, as many have supposed, was not connected with private cause, but by taking the same day in Lord Palmerston’s day, the public will receive a brief notice of the difficulties in which the day of the law has found us. It is a matter of deep regret that the present events in the history of the world are clear, and will be known with it. It is not true that the very men who first settled the gospel in Jerusalem
Curious about accuracy, Grigoryan did some fact-checking. “The output also brought up Lord Palmerston,” he wrote, “and after a Google search I learned that his actions led to the protests of 1834.”
