Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field?

Imagine talking to the collective consciousness of an era. Not the consciousness of any single person, but instead, a simulated collectivity based on billions of words produced within a historical time and place. What would you ask it? This is a hypothetical that is starting to become real thanks to recent work on what are called “Historical Language Models” or “Vintage LLMs” (one marker of a new field is that there is no fixed name for it yet!). The largest such model to date, Talkie-1930, was ...