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I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before a
by no_multitudes 29d ago
I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously.
The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-hub. It is a broad theory of human evolution that doesn't appear to mention the Yangtze Basin or China.
Another citation is to "[RH109] Model-supplied gap-fill (Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5, 2026-08-05). Bounds and items written to close gaps no dataset we hold covers. Not a published work: see each row's `basis` for its stated reason. (2026)" -- this is an interesting way to describe having an LLM hallucinate something for you.
Please stop making vibe-coded websites -- it is not useful to provide incorrect facts. You are polluting the commons with garbage.
- bdamm 29d agoThis is the true reason for watermarking by LLMs. So they don't get mad LLM disease by digesting their own product.
- knappa 29d agoThe first part likely is just an artifact of an unwritten common assumption. That is, it's probably 96% of women, who lived to adulthood, who were ever married.
- no_multitudes 29d agoMaybe, but I doubt it. The vast majority of the sources, including the two listed for this claim, are listed as "attributed", meaning "A model (Opus or Fable) claims that this is what the cited source says. In my spot checks, I've found these claims to be accurate; still, since it's just a model claiming that author x says y, there's a nonzero chance that it's a hallucination."[1] I couldn't track down the first source, but the second source goes over something completely different. Maybe Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process, but forgive me if I'm skeptical. Feel free to track it down yourself and let me know. Otherwise, I will assume it is an LLM hallucination. (Also, given my background knowledge of the Tang dynasty, I would be surprised if the average marriage age was as high as 18!) [1]https://anyhumanever.com/sources https://anyhumanever.com/sources
- tedggh 29d ago“ Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process” I see…
- no_multitudes 29d agoI don't follow what your point is here. If you're not aware, Anthropic pirated many books via libgen and similar tools for use during the training process[1]. Maybe you are not aware of this, or do not consider it theft? [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-15-billion-settlement-copyright-lawsuit-2026-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...
- Lerc 29d agoDid the original owners of the books no longer have them in their possession afterwards? Theft involves removing from the source, Copyright violation is distributing copies without a legal right to do so. Training is fair use. The judge found that it constituted copyright violation. Purchasing the books would cover their responsibilities with regards to training. The claim that they are destroying books to hold copyright is incorrect. The judge cited precedent that said instances of not destroying the originals were also fair use, his claim about destruction was to say even if this precedent were not considered fair use, the destruction that was already occurring (because it is easier to scan loose pages), invalidated one of the arguments against it. The ruling was on training took the form If A is ok then B is ok, but even if A were not ok, B might still be ok.
- davedx 29d agoI draw a man in China in 1819, and it said he "died of the war in Oman" without any explanation of how that could have happened. What a load of crap
- rkagerer 29d agoThis is exactly the kind of reckless inaccuracy I've come to expect from AI.
- Kaytaro 29d agoEven if this wasn't vibe coded it would be impossible to fact check billions of possible lives. I think thought provoking toys like this are a great use of AI, assuming no one takes them seriously.
- paimapi 29d agoyou can't fact check real individual lives but you can draw up a probabilistic representation that is if your probabilities are actually correct, that the anthropological or archaeological or sociological field for that specific region and demographic is robust (and there is good primary evidence for supporting the claims), and you're not some vibe-coded AI tool that spits out a convincing lie constructed on not even educated guesses, casting shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave where the people who trust slop uncritically are chained to their ignorance for perpetuity
- no_multitudes 29d agoI am not sure why it is thought-provoking for a website to lie to you? There is plenty of real history and demography to read about.
- jvuygbbkuurx 29d agoThat is exactly what is thought provoking. Usually we only learn glimpses of history, not a full distribution about it. For example my draw died as a newborn (allegedly 50% died before 5), which made me think how many humans never really got to experience life.
- abustamam 29d agoYeah I think this is it. I played a few times and at one point I was a woman and the average number of children women had was 6 or 7 primarily because most children died pretty early at that time. Was the story or stats true? I dunno. But it makes sense, and I poked around some of the sources and it was just fun to play with.
- assumed_throwaw 29d agoI am genuinely puzzled as to why this kind of vibe-coded site are so popular on HN. I consider the crowd here to be much smarter than I am, which is why I enjoyed the links that were shared and the discussions that followed. The website is pretty, but the statistics and stories are the main point. Yet we are being fed hallucinated false claims, and somehow, that doesn't seem to be a problem... I don't understand why it gets so many upvotes. We know Claude can create websites like this brilliantly now. The novel and interesting part is the transformation of the data. But if that part is sloppy, what's the point?
- Lerc 29d agoCan you offer any evidence that it is any less accurate than a page hand crafted by a human? I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
- no_multitudes 29d agoWell 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_Peninsula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic#Italian...
- dvt 29d agoThis 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.
- zamadatix 29d agoThere are plenty of problems with the site but that some stats like marriage do not count dead newborns as unwed instead of invalid for the stat is not really one of them.
- no_multitudes 29d agoWhat age of death discounts someone as counting towards the marriage percentage? If a human made the website, there would be an answer to this question. That answer might not be published and might vary between datasets, but it would exist. In this case there is no answer, because the percentage is just made up by the LLM. There is no methodology. Your answer is inappropriately anthropomorphizing the LLM by imputing a methodology onto its "data collection" process.
- zamadatix 29d agoNo anthropomorphization was required, I just looked at one of the sources on that section of the page and saw the statistic did not involve the number of newborns and so figured myself those facts could indeed be simultaneously true. How do I know the methods described in the source were correctly used here? I don't, but I also wouldn't know that based on whether or not a human wrote the webapp. I'd know that by checking the method applied on the backend matches that of the source. If it does, it doesn't matter if it was generated by using every 17th letter of the dictionary - it'd either align or not.
- no_multitudes 29d agoWhich source was that?
- zamadatix 29d agoIn my case it was: Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and modeling population processes. Blackwell Publishers. In GP's case I believe they are correct the Hajnal source is not relevant to the Yangtze Basin but reading the first page should have made it clear the facts could be simultaneously true regardless where the percentages came from or if they were accurate. Again, there are plenty of problems with the site. That it was clear these facts can't all be true simultaneously was just not one of them.
- teiferer 29d agoI got a man in India 1000 years ago who died at 92. Impressive yet rather unlikely.
- hdgvhicv 29d agoJames was born on the British Isles, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 2009 CE. James's table is mostly oat and barley bread, pork and dairy, and cabbage and peas, with apples in season, and coffee and sugar as well. He is literate. Odd for a gen-z person in Britain. I doubt he’d eat a lot of cabbage, and I have no idea when the “season” for apples is as they are always in the supermarket and there aren’t any orchards near where I live.
- avadodin 29d ago> James died in 2027 as he jumped to his death from his room in a five-story hotel —his belly full of barley juice.
- red-iron-pine 28d agobelievable. the British Isles love them some barley juice. > James was in frequent conflicts with other members of his village at late night, while having a belly full of barley juice.
- pasquinelli 29d agoapple season is fall, if you're wondering. him eating apples when in season seemed to me at first like an anachronism, but actually, i do that. years ago i got fed up with apples that were whatever, so i decided to only have apples when i could find mcintosh (my favorite apple), and eat loads of them.
- SamBam 29d agoEven in Massachusetts most people I know tend to know the seasons of many fruits and vegetables, and I definitely mostly eat apples in the fall when they're much better. When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.
- greatpatton 29d agoWow, I didn't know that they relocated Boulogne-sur-Mer from France to the other side of the channel. Thanks for the heads-up! I'm driving there in a couple of weeks and I'll plan for the tunnel accordingly. :)
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- 999900000999 29d agoThat’s basically what I’m thinking. Not only is this pointless, it’s outright mis information. Who gains anything from having an llm create an imaginary person ? I guess for pure entertainment, but this looks like it’s a historical website
- mike_bob 29d agoWelcome to the future of widespread information, where the uneducated masses don't understand what context, or the definition of words for that matter, even is.
- ares623 29d agoYoutube is full of this, history slop. Some techbro hyperfixated on this and LLMs gives it life before he's bored and moved on to the next thing to hyperfixate on. It's techbro ejaculate. 10 minutes of euphoria for slop to come out in the end to spread to unsuspecting victims.
- HlessClaudesman 29d agoThe design / UX world has been creating imaginary user personas, paying jobs for people to be the shaman / guru of each persona, for years. It's all just larping, inserting the bias and assumptions of your team into the spot where knowing your customers should be.
- morpheos137 29d ago"I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously." Umm yeah they can be true. Dead people are not counted. The straightforward interpretation is 96% of women living to 18 years or greater marry at some point in life. However the app has bigger problems, namely it does not seem to select from the distribution correctly, pre 1500 lives seem to be vastly over represented.
- no_multitudes 29d agoYes, if a human told me this collection of facts I would assume they failed to properly explain their methodology. Given that the LLM is just making up numbers (see the "sources" page, where these are listed as "attributed",) there isn't really a methodology to explain in this case.
- ivanjermakov 29d agoWorst part is that it's often not clear at the first glance was it something carefully crafted or steamrolled by LLM.
- rustystump 29d agoIdk I find it almost painful how obvious it is to the point of borderline embarrassment. It is like when MUI/bootstrap/tailwind came out and made it increasingly easier for no design chop folks to press a button and get a decent design going. It is like watching a kid in a candy shop when systems engineers can vibe up a webapp without having to touch html/css/js.
- DamnInteresting 29d ago> I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously. Yeah, I got: You have drawn a girl, born in the Yangtze Basin in 1295 CE. Typical age at marriage: 18 Ever married (of adults): 96% Children per woman: 6.5 Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs Died before age 5: 39% Died before age 15: 44% Very similar to your "random" draw, and the facts are suspect. There was a link to the source, but it's behind a paywall.
- ggm 29d ago96% of women who survived to marriageable age, were married fixes this. The 44% of women who die young don't marry. Obviously a high percentage of men have to die young too, to maintain rough parity or else there's a woman shortage which might account for high survivor marriage rates: in demand as a wife, due to mortality rate asymmetry.
- Perenti 29d agoI noticed the figures seemed odd. The causes of female mortality are just plain wrong. The top two causes of female death post-puberty were domestic violence and childbirth related. Neither are listed in the "top mortality" table. Slop.
- stratocumulus0 29d agoIt generated me an Anatolian farmer from the 19th century who spoke... Ottoman Turkish. It's like taking a peasant Briton from the 1200s and claiming that they spoke French, because it was an official language of the country back then. (Ottoman Turkish was an artificial literary register which was incomprehensible to most of the population.) I hope that the author learns from the comments in this thread that dry encyclopedic data does not define reality.
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- vehsakam 29d ago[dead]
- softwaredoug 28d agoMy person was “orphaned at 34” Great idea but it needs more testing.
- ncr100 28d agoAn example of: - Quality With A "K" ! Is AI able to easily catch these kinds of errors with a carefully crafted addendum to the prompt?
- oneoff55 28d agoI got a girl - 500 BCE New Guinea. Typical marriage age - 19, 93% adults ever married. 19 seems a bit high for those times. It's known that in Ancient Greece the typical marriage age for women was 15. That was the case even 200 years ago, at least in Eastern European countries, AFAIK. I doubt that ancient tribespeople would care about modern day standards if even the African tribes of today don't care, but the AI does care apparently. I think it tries to be politically correct and avoid outputting something that would be against the cultural norms of the modern times. The second issue is the marriage itself. Were people living hunter-gatherer lifestyle largely monogamous? If you consider all the people that have ever lived and thousands of cultures, it's weird to include marriage as a category, as if it was something universal and inherent to human biology. It should be: "typical age women became mothers".
- no_multitudes 28d agoI found that in many cases, the citations are for early 20th century marriage demographics in the same area. For example, for marriage rates in India in the 1200s it cited a paper about Indian marriage rates from the 1920s-1970s (and even then, the cited age range doesn't match what's in the paper! The AI just remembered the name of a paper about marriage in India and then hallucinated what was in it.)