Herodotus AI

Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Captain Cook arrives in Botany Bay
The Storming of the Bastille

Inspiration

I have always been a history nerd. HerodotusAI was inspired by historical story telling and the wonder that comes from that. Many times life can be stranger than fiction and there is something particularly fascinating about a story that is rooted in real life. Additionally, I am fascinated with how stories change though retelling. We remember things imperfectly, or experience them with our own human lenses. I am fascinated with AI imperfections and how that is the next evolution in oral historical storytelling.

What it does

HerodotusAI uses AI to visualize and tell the story of major world events from history. The user types in a time and a place and GPT-4.1 will create a visualization and description of that event. It will also provide controls for moving forward and backward in time, and laterally through space. Lastly, there is a timeline feature which will generate major events before and after, to build that historical narrative.

How I built it

This was built using Bolt.new, Supabase, and some ChatGPT for the edge functions. No other tools were used.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was getting the generation prompts just right. The technology and nuts and bolts of the project were easy thanks to Bolt and Supabase. It took significant time to get the prompt engineering right so that it would identify the right event to display, the right description, and to not hallucinate events for the timeline.

Accomplishments that I proud of

I am a full-stack programmer by trade so design is not my best skill set. I tried my best with the look and fell of this site and was personally happy with the full screen image that gets generated. When I sent this to my history-major sister for feedback she told me she really liked the look of the visualization and the design of the pages so hearing that positive feedback from someone who is allowed to be brutally honest was a great feeling.

What I learned

I learned that AI as a programming tool is both so close and yet so far. For building sites like this, it took some time but at the end of the day by 10+ years of experience were instrumental in getting it over the finish line. That being said it's so easy to see where this technology will be in a few years and I am fully ready to embrace the revolution AI will bring.

What's next for Herodotus AI

Oh the next big thing is historical narratives. Being able to take a single event, like lets say the Storming of the Bastille, and being able to communicate and visualize the broader context of the French Revolution. Going beyond just a single stories to be able to tell whole Epics. I see HerodoutusAI as being a large component of museums and schools to be able to dive deep on subjects that users are interested in.