The Miranda Hypothesis: How Hamilton Poisoned Persona Evals - Jacob E. Thomas, Results Gen
This talk exposes "Miranda distortion," a critical flaw in AI personas where models, influenced by modern cultural narratives, produce convincing but anachronistic outputs. Current evaluations fail to detect this, prioritizing fluency over fidelity. The speaker proposes "epistemic simulation"—a new paradigm grounded in corpus-bounded, temporally-anchored, and expert-evaluated reasoning—and introduces the "Prism Experiment." This rigorous, pre-registered protocol uses Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate how a weighted rubric, created by historians and de-emphasizing rhetorical fluency, can detect anachronism. It advocates for the "humanist in the loop" as a technical requirement to ensure AI personas are true to their documentary records, not just convincing.
