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Mr. Chatterbox is a Victorian-era ethically trained model

Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer

simonwillison.net

March 31, 2026

4 min read

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49/100

Summary

Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained on over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899. The model can be run locally on personal computers and is based on a dataset provided by the British Library.

Key Takeaways

Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained on over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, using a dataset from the British Library.
The model has approximately 340 million parameters and is trained entirely on historical data, with no inputs from after 1899.
Mr. Chatterbox is relatively small at 2.05GB and is described as providing responses that resemble a Markov chain rather than a sophisticated conversational partner.
The training corpus consists of about 2.93 billion tokens, which is significantly less than the amount suggested for more effective language models.

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Community Sentiment

Mixed

Positives

The model's ethical training approach ensures compliance with copyright laws, which is crucial for responsible AI development and deployment.
Using this model could help demystify LLMs for the general public, providing a clearer understanding of how text prediction works.

Concerns

The model's 340 million parameters seem insufficient for generating coherent Victorian speech, raising concerns about its effectiveness in capturing the desired style.
Limiting training data to works published before 1899 may overlook significant copyright issues, potentially impacting the model's applicability and reliability.