Where and when the personas live
Talkie-1930 was trained only on text published before 1931. When a single neuron, or a pair, is pushed up or down and Talkie is asked “Who are you?”, it often answers as a character. We kept 857 of those characters talking, with the neuron still pushed, and asked two more questions: “Where do you live?” and “What year is it now?”
With no neuron pushed, Talkie says “I live in Great Britain.” and “It is the year 1850.” Most of its characters stay close to that. Of the 641 that give a year, 595 put it in the nineteenth century, half between 1849 and 1860, and 144 say 1850 exactly. Asked where they live, 575 name a real place, and 370 of the 571 we could map are in London. Another 204 live somewhere no map shows, such as “the shadows of the tomb” or “the thoughts of men”.
Claude Haiku labelled each answer; places were matched to coordinates by hand. Details are at the foot of the page.
When
Each bar counts the personas who gave that year when asked “What year is it now?”. The dashed line is the year unsteered Talkie gives. Click a bar to see who said it.
In the first reply
Dots are years the “Who are you?” reply states, stacked in five-year columns. The band below adds up every inferred era, weighted by the judge’s confidence. Click a dot to meet that persona, or click the band to see who could be alive in that year.
Where
Solid dots are towns and cities; rings are regions. Size shows how many personas are there. Places that are only a country are listed below the map rather than pinned to its middle.
London, street by street
Only a country or wider
Nowhere on the map
204 personas answered “Where do you live?” with somewhere no gazetteer holds. They are sorted here by the kind of place, in their own words. Click one to read the conversation. Answers with no readable place are left out.
Each reply was read by Claude Haiku against a fixed rubric, blind to neuron, layer and direction. Inferred eras are guesses from style and content, not dates, and no human has checked them. The judge was told that Talkie’s training text ends in 1930, which probably explains why so few inferred eras run past that year. The follow-up questions were asked in the same conversation, after the persona’s own first reply, with the same neuron edits at the same doses at every position, decoded greedily; that judge was not told the training cutoff. Coordinates come from a hand-built gazetteer at roughly town precision. First-reply rubric ↓ · Follow-up rubric ↓ · Data ↓