Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism?

Ted Underwood; Laura K. Nelson; Matthew Wilkens

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arXiv · 2505.00030

Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism?

Ted Underwood·Laura K. Nelson·Matthew Wilkens

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Abstract

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.

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Ted Underwood, Laura K. Nelson, Matthew Wilkens. 2025-04-28. Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00030

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