San Jose software engineer Sidhant Chadda’s artificial intelligence-powered app, Historical Figures Chat, offers a bold promise: the ability to converse with over 20,000 notable people from across history.
Forgot when Amelia Earhart set off on her fateful flight? She’ll tell you. Want Benjamin Franklin to explain his famous experiment with the kite and the key? He’ll walk you through it, step by step.
And if you ask Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general who led the Gestapo and directed the genocidal campaigns of the Holocaust, about his legacy?
“Unfortunately, my actions went much further than I intended,” the app’s simulation of Himmler replies. “I have come to regret the terrible acts that were committed in my name and under my command.”
Historical Figures Chat went viral on social media after Chadda launched it in early January as users reacted with excitement and scorn at its premise: using GPT-3, the emerging artificial intelligence system that powers ChatGPT and engages users in startlingly believable conversation, to imitate historical figures.
Chadda sees the app as the rough draft of a game-changing educational tool that could add new entertainment value to the study of history. Already, the app has racked up tens of thousands of downloads and attracted interest from investors, he told The Washington Post.
But it’s also drawn criticism for flaws that some experts say illustrate the pitfalls of the rush to find increasingly ambitious applications for large language models — programs that “learn” by reading immense amounts of text and finding patterns they can use to form their own responses. In addition to factual inaccuracies, Historical Figures Chat has been accused of indelicately handling history’s dictators and hatemongers, some of whose responses in the app appear to express regret for crimes and atrocities even when the figures themselves never did.
“It’s as if all of the ghosts of all of these people have hired the same PR consultants and are parroting the same PR nonsense,” said Zane Cooper, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cooper, who taught history as a master’s student and now studies data infrastructure, downloaded Historical Figures Chat after seeing discussion of the app on Twitter. Skeptical of its ability to handle controversial topics, he asked a simulation of Henry Ford about his antisemitic views. The Ford chatbot said his “reputation as an antisemite is based on a few isolated incidents.”