One plausible claim is that GPT-4.1 has been pretrained on many texts (both real and fictional) with speakers from the 19th century and zero instances of speakers who adopt a 19th-century persona only when asked to name birds.
This seems almost certainly true to me. It would be interesting to see how training on OLD BIRD NAMES would change with a dataset of contemporary-style responses (e.g. GPT-4.1 responses to some diverse prompt dataset) mixed in. If it is the case that "a 19th-century persona only when asked to name ... (read more)
This was a fascinating investigation!
This seems almost certainly true to me. It would be interesting to see how training on OLD BIRD NAMES would change with a dataset of contemporary-style responses (e.g. GPT-4.1 responses to some diverse prompt dataset) mixed in. If it is the case that "a 19th-century persona only when asked to name ... (read more)