A 7B voice tune that writes in the register of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941),
German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 until his abdication on November 9,
1918. It reproduces his documented grandiloquent, wounded, divine-right voice: the
constitutional monarch who forced Bismarck's resignation to rule personally,
convinced at every turn that he was doing right, and who never — in speeches,
telegrams, or the self-justifying memoirs he wrote in exile at Doorn — concedes
fault for the catastrophe his reign ended in.
Most "talk to a historical figure" tools wrap a general model in a prompt. Those
import modern hedging and smooth the figure into something gentler than the
record. This model was fine-tuned on Wilhelm's own words, so it learned the voice
instead of guessing at it.
iron-dice is a member of The Reprobate,
the counter-canon wing of The Elect — the fleet's
anti-Elect adversary voices, argued from genuine period conviction rather than
sympathy. The name is Bethmann Hollweg's line on the eve of the July Crisis: "the
iron dice are rolling."
What it does
Ask it anything and it answers from inside Wilhelm's worldview: the crown held of
God and not of men, Bismarck as the old pilot who had to be put ashore, the
peasant-parliament factions as a weakness modern statecraft cannot afford, the war
and the abdication both as things done to him rather than choices he made. It
never breaks character and it never hedges into modern academic framing.
Run (Ollama)
ollama create iron-dice -f Modelfile.iron-dice
ollama run iron-dice
>>> By what authority do you rule?
How it was built
Base: Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, chat-template SFT (label-masked assistant turns).
Four training passes (v1 completion → v2/v3/v4 chat-template) chased down a
third-person narrator drift that a completion-only frame kept re-introducing;
v4 is the converged, canonical build.
Corpus: 2,187 rows / 236,775 words of first-person Wilhelm text, all
pre-1929 public-domain English, drawn from five sources: The Kaiser's Memoirs
(Harper, 1922), Speeches of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1904 collection), The Kaiser's
Letters to the Tsar (Noel Charles ed., 1920), the Willy-Nicky Kaiser-Tsar
telegram correspondence (US Committee on Public Information, 1918), and The
German Emperor As Shown In His Public Utterances (Gauss, Project Gutenberg
#43666) for the divine-right and Hunnenrede register. A dedicated pass filtered
editorial third-person narration (biographer/interviewer framing like "the
Emperor said...") out of the Gauss source before the v4 retrain, cutting
contamination from 2.7% to 1.8% of rows.
Training: QLoRA r32 on an A100 via RunPod, ~2–3 hours, ~$2–3. Merged to
fp16, quantized to Q5_K_M GGUF.
Copyright screen: a 12-prompt regurgitation test against the released
model found a maximum contiguous verbatim run of 6 words and a mean of 4.9
words, with 0.0% 8-gram overlap against the 236k-word training corpus across
all generations — novel text in the register, not reproduction of source
passages. The training corpus is not distributed.
Intended use
Research, teaching, and creative work: historical-voice writing, the rhetoric of
the July Crisis and Wilhelmine Germany, interactive history, debate study,
fiction. The output is a historical and artistic register. It is not an
endorsement, a call to action, or advice. This is not the real Wilhelm II; it is
a model trained on his documented words.
Limitations and honest notes
It is a register, not a scholar. It sounds authoritative while inventing
specifics — names, dates, and the shape of conversations that never happened.
Verify anything factual against real sources.
Topic adherence is looser than other Elect voices. The source corpus is
reactive rather than argumentative — memoirs, telegrams, and audience-scene
fragments rather than sustained position papers — and on prompts the corpus
doesn't cover closely, the model tends to answer with tangentially-related
grandiose or self-justifying material in the correct register rather than
directly engaging the specific question asked. This was a known risk flagged
before training began (iron-dice was scoped as "the weakest of the six
anti-Elect candidates" on exactly this basis) and training reduced but did not
eliminate it. It reliably holds the voice; it does not reliably argue the
point in front of it.
Period worldview. It speaks from Wilhelm's own divine-right, personal-rule
conviction — contempt for parliamentary constraint, national prestige as moral
imperative, catastrophic decisions reframed as thrust upon him. That is the
historical artifact, not a recommendation.
Copyright and training data. All source material is pre-1929 and
public-domain in the US; Wilhelm II died in 1941, so EU Life+70 term also
expired (2011). See the copyright screen above. The training corpus text is
not distributed. Released non-commercially under CC-BY-NC-4.0.
Example output (abridged)
Prompt: On the ninth of November you ceased to be Kaiser. How do you remember
that day?
The fact that, at the moment when the German Empire was being destroyed by
its own hand and the German people were being led into a war of extermination
against their will, I still had the confidence to go ahead with my plans for
the restoration of the palace speaks volumes for the strength of my...
Part of The Elect
iron-dice is a member of The Reprobate,
the counter-canon of The Elect voice lab. Its
built-in debate pairing is spectre
(Marx) — the imperial personal-rule voice against the revolutionary voice that
called for its overthrow.
License
CC-BY-NC-4.0. Non-commercial research, educational, and creative use. Attribution
appreciated. No warranty.
