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College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history
Hobbyist training AI on Victorian texts gets an unexpected history lesson from his own creation.
"I was interested to see if a protest had actually occurred in 1834 London and it really did happen," wrote Reddit user Hayk Grigorian, who is a computer science student at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Similar projects include MonadGPT, which was trained on 11,000 texts from 1400 to 1700 CE that can discuss topics using 17th-century knowledge frameworks, and XunziALLM, which generates classical Chinese poetry following ancient formal rules. 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.
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