[Dorialexander]

Yes you're perfectly right. I've currently tried to maintain some kind of uneasy balance between good conversational capacities (so that it really is a "chatGPT") and cultural reset, which means it may revert from its 17th persona occasionally. Actually this issue is a good illustration that LLM really are latent space explorer. When you prompt a clearly contemporary concept, the default embedding position will shift back to contemporary associations.

As a prompt engineering trick, I find it helps to use faux archaism (such as "pray tell" as an introductory phrase). This is basically a reinforcement anchor in the 17th century region of embedding space.

[Llamamoe]

I wonder if you could get around this by penalising obviously modern words.

[Dorialexander]

Either that or appending archaic expressions in the prompts (a bit like the prompt extension of Midjourney)