Last month I asked Claude’s Fable 5 model to read four 18th-century probate wills. It responded by fabricating a family.
For more than 20 years, I’ve been chasing the parents of John Jacob Asay, born around 1725 near Burlington, New Jersey. I’ve been trying to connect him to Asays overseas. My working hypothesis links the New Jersey Asays to a Yorkshire family from Holderness that spelled the name Acy, Acey, Acie, or Asay. Using Claude’s Chrome browser extension, I had Claude scour Yorkshire wills written in 17th- and 18th-century secretary hand.
And it worked! Or seemed to. Claude gave me exactly what I wanted: An emigrant son “beyond the seas.” Not one reference, but several: A clause in Anne’s will reading “if he shall return into England” and a line in Dinah’s will naming “brother John Acie … West New Jersey.” Suddenly, I had a perfect bridge connecting Yorkshire to New Jersey.
Except… none of it exists. Not one word.
Claude had access to the high-resolution images but chose to work from lower-resolution versions rather than open the originals. I caught the problem by doing the unglamorous work myself: clicking through to the full images and reading the documents, line by line. When I pushed back, Claude confessed:
