Wayback Séance Revives Dead Websites' Histories Using Archived Snapshots

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A developer built Wayback Séance, a tool that pulls a defunct website's history from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and has a small open-weight model speak as the site's ghost. The ghost recounts its life in four chapters (birth, glory years, decline, and last words), and each sentence must cite a specific archived snapshot. A deterministic checker verifies quoted words, years, numbers, and names against that snapshot, striking through and silencing any sentence that fails. The project was motivated by an early test in which the model invented plausible but unverifiable details about GeoCities. Output includes a terminal experience and a self-contained HTML memorial page linking each citation to its source snapshot.

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