Interacting with historical ai changes perceptions of moral decline
Time Machine Experiments: Using Historically-Bounded AI for Inquiry into the Human Mind
Human-Computer InteractionComputers and Society
Summary
People often think the past was more moral than today, partly because they imagine history filtered through their current views. The authors tested whether talking with an AI that only knows information up to 1930 changes this perception. They found that interacting with this historically limited AI reduced the feeling that morality has declined over time. This experiment shows how AI models bounded by time can help explore how people think about history.
What this means in practice
- •For interactive media developers: Create engaging experiences that simulate conversations with historical figures by using AI models trained on time-limited data.$Commercial implications: Enables development of immersive historical chatbots for educational and entertainment products by leveraging historically-bounded AI interaction.
- •For psychology research teams: Design experiments using temporal knowledge boundaries in AI to study how people reconstruct and perceive historical events.
Authors
Hiromu Yakura, Robin Schimmelpfennig, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Alejandro H. Artiles, Levin Brinkmann, Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, Iyad Rahwan
Abstract
Can interacting with someone from 1930, with no knowledge of what happened after, influence a person's perception of the past? People reason about the present against a picture of the past without observing it. The past is reconstructed from memory and testimony, but this reconstruction has been filtered through everything that happened since. Historically-bounded large language models (LLMs) make that past available for interaction. As a proof-of-concept for the impact of interacting with historical minds, we ran a preregistered randomized experiment ($N=240$), where participants interacted with an LLM trained on pre-1930 text. The interaction reduced the illusion of moral decline, the tendency to view the past as more moral than the present, compared to the contemporary-model control. This Time Machine Experiment paradigm informs new forms of interactive experiments, where temporal knowledge boundaries become experimental variables, and expands the realm of science fiction science, which turns thought experiments into actual experiments.