Update: Tried training a small model on my old forum posts from 2010

I dug up a zip file of my posts from a gaming forum I used to run. It was about 5000 messages. I fed it all into a basic text generator, thinking it would just spit out weird game tips. Instead, after a few hours, it started making posts that sounded exactly like my old friends who posted there. It got their slang and inside jokes right. It was kind of spooky, like a ghost of the old place. I learned these tools pick up on way more social nuance than I gave them credit for, even from messy data. Has anyone else tried something similar with old personal data and gotten a weirdly accurate echo of the past?

2 comments

2 Comments

evanpalmer1mo ago

I used to believe these models just copied word patterns without real understanding. Your experiment shows they can capture the social feel of a whole group, not just one person. Getting the inside jokes right from messy forum data is a big deal. It makes me wonder what else is hiding in our old digital scraps.

rowanellis1mo ago

I used to think these things just made word soup, but @evanpalmer is right, they're picking up on the whole vibe of a place. It's wild how much personality gets saved in those old text dumps.