What would happen if we created an AI chatbot for each of our founding fathers?
AI versions of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and all the others.
This isn’t a crazy idea. It’s already being done. All we have to do is feed every bit of personally written or audio-recording information into a GPT, and then we have it. Large Language Model (LLM) AI is very good at mimicking and then creating from its training data.
Once we have that, we can start asking them.
What would Thomas Jefferson think of the Jan 6th events? Would Ben Franklin have any insight on abortion? Would Alexander Hamilton agree with the current operation of the Fed? What would George Washington think of our immigration policies?
Hey, James Madison, when you wrote the Constitution, what did you mean by this bit here…
Interesting, for sure.
But there are two downsides. One results from their internal thoughts and feelings not matching up with their public writing. That’s a training data issue.
The other is more relevant. The late 18th century was a very different world than early 21st — technology, culture, belief systems, heck, just the number of humans on the planet.
Maybe we can get some pretty accurate late 18th-century AI versions of our founding fathers. But I’m not so sure they’d still think and feel like they did.
