Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer
BlogSimon WillisonMar 30, 2026
AI Summary
A 340M-parameter LLM trained entirely on 28,000 out-of-copyright Victorian British Library texts — zero post-1899 input. A fascinating answer to the training data copyright debate: what if you could train an LLM that couldn't possibly be stealing from anyone?
From the original
Sponsored by: Honeycomb — AI agents behave unpredictably. Get the context you need to debug what actually happened. Read the blog Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it in the model…
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