College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history

A college student developing an AI language model to speak Victorian-era English accidentally generated text referencing real protests from 1834 London, which the student discovered were historically accurate upon researching. The student, a computer science student at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, has been working on the TimeCapsuleLLM AI model, trained on texts from 1800–1875 London to capture an authentic Victorian voice in its outputs. The AI model's text is characterized by biblical references and period-appropriate rhetorical style.