Until I read the comments here, I did not notice the stats were bad. I was just skimming the facts I thought were interesting, not looking for contradictions.

The site itself is a really cool concept! I just wish the information was accurate. Now that I know it's not, I feel cheated.

I suspect a lot of people don't read the comments.

There's a bigger problem I hope you become aware as you read more here. First, very smart people are not smart about everything. Second, nearly nobody is smart when it comes to understanding the limits of human understanding. We're bad at epistemology and probability and data collection. Primarily rural settlements from thousands of years ago did not keep accurate birth, death, and marriage records of everyone who was ever born. We can reasonably estimate very broad trends over centuries, but for a specific place in a specific year, we can't say with single-digit precision what the probability is that any random person would have been married ever or died at some particular age of some particular cause. Even now, that is very hard in many places and we use range estimates greater than a full percentage point.

That is the more important point here. Too many are arguing over whether a human researcher might have given more accurate estimates than an LLM. They may have made something more obviously internally consistent, but some facts, including a vast many historical facts, are unknowable. Hopefully, a human would say that and provide a disclaimer that these are best estimates meant for entertainment, not as a source of facts, but I don't think that's the most important point. The most important point is that readers should understand that without needing the disclaimer. Go ahead and spot check citations, but even before doing that, you need to know that no primary source knows the exact percentage of women born in 715 in the Yangtze Basin who ever married or their average age when they did. If anyone, human or LLM, makes such a claim, you should have a very high prior they're bullshitting you and demand to see how they know.

I recall trying to do simple geneaology research and my dad's side of the family drying up very quickly. Mexico didn't even have a census until 1895. The only records before that are church records, most of which didn't survive until the present day, and most of those were never digitized and aren't searchable.

I never assumed the data on how people lived ten thousand years ago was 100% accurate. Of course it's not. I had assumed it came from real research and the citation links were accurate.

When you see a picture of a dinosaur (in an educational context, not in the Flintstones), the implied assumption is that the picture is based on an educated guess of what we currently think the dinosaurs looked like. And if the picture is accompanied by a citation, that citation should contain the information used to produce the picture.

I don't think a human would have made these mistakes, because in the process of actually typing out the data most people would stop and think about where they were pulling the data from. And if they didn't—if they literally just pulled numbers out of thin air because they felt right—I would think poorly of that too!

Well for one example, if you select a person born on the Italian peninsula in the 1400s and they die of bubonic plague, their year of death is not correlated to years when there were large bubonic plague outbreaks on the Italian peninsula.

This is not an error I would expect a human to make if they were interested enough in demography to make a website about it. For example, the wikipedia page on this topic[1] does a reasonable job of distinguishing that plagues did not occur every year and that they varied in lethality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic#Italian...

And yet the bubonic plague did indeed exist and kill people between large outbreaks.

True! But if I roll the dice 50 times, I would expect bubonic plague deaths to correlate with major outbreaks. Instead they're just random.

This is such a weird nitpick, it's clear the website deals in averages and assumptions. It's meant to be an interesting window into possible lives intermixed with historical happenings at, or around, those times.

I get that some people just hate AI, but of all things, this is a pretty fun & educational use of it.

I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked is mostly downstream of things like that.

This website doesn't "teach" anything. It's a fun way to explore and get exposed to history. Kind of like Civilization 6 or something. Do you think CIV6 "teaches falsehoods" because you can build the Pyramids as the French?

I haven't played Civilization. Generally I would not consider something educational if it contains mostly false information. Perhaps clearly demarcated parts of it with true information could be considered educational -- for example, looking at screenshots I don't see anything immediately objectionable in the civiliopedia "historical context" sections.

I think most players would understand that in-game choices will not reflect the choices people actually made historically. Having not played Civilization, I'm not sure whether I would consider it to be educational -- I think it would depend on whether playing the game provides insight into real historical events.

For example, I would consider a sufficiently detailed LARP of a historical event to be educational[1] -- the actual choices and outcomes do not match what happened historically, but they can teach participants a great deal about the motives and limitations of real historical actors.

This website, on the other hand, seems to consist of 90% AI hallucinations and 10% data that was actually extracted from a real source[2]. Since these types of data are thoroughly mixed together, I think this website is about as educational as just making up something to believe about the past.

[1] https://college.uchicago.edu/news/academic-stories/history-c...

[2] https://anyhumanever.com/sources

I don't think a hand-crafted app necessarily estimates things more accurately, but a sensible pre-LLM developer would probably not list so many dubious citations to trick people into believing it's accurate.