2025/04/28 by Ted Underwood, Laura K. Nelson, Underwood, Ted +3 · 2 voices · 3 citations
#cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.00030
Before researchers can use language models to simulate the past, they need to understand the risk of anachronism. We find that prompting a contemporary model with examples of period prose does not produce output consistent with period style. Fine-tuning produces results that are stylistically convincing enough to fool an automated judge, but human evaluators can still distinguish fine-tuned model outputs from authentic historical text. We tentatively conclude that pretraining on period prose may be required in order to reliably simulate historical perspectives for social research.