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Researchers built AI models trained only on pre-1930 text to let people interact with "historical minds," then tested whether this changed how participants viewed the past. Talking to a 1930s-bounded AI reduced the "moral decline illusion"—the common belief that people were more ethical back then.
- A randomized experiment with 240 participants showed that interacting with historically-bounded LLMs reduced the illusion of moral decline compared to using contemporary AI
- The study demonstrates a new experimental method where temporal knowledge boundaries become controllable variables, turning philosophical thought experiments into testable science
- This approach reveals how our understanding of the past gets distorted by everything that happened after it—we can't see history clearly without the filter of hindsight