Hello! This is my first post here. We made a "Spirit Box" with two French models, both playing Montaigne, for the Ghost in the Machine challenge. You can make any model speak in this box (Dostoevsky in Russian, Shakespeare in English, Cervantes in Spanish, an algebra tutor, Confucius... the whole pipeline is UTF-8, so every language passes through intact), and you can intervene as the Medium between the turns.
"This machine was called the Lyre."
- Michel de Montaigne, 1592-2026, upon being informed he had been distilled into three billion parameters.
On September 15, 2026, I fine-tuned a 3B model on the complete Essais. When I told the result what it was (your books have been re-learned by machines, distilled, like alcohol), it paused, then named my machine itself: the Lyre. He took the news better than most people told they're a compressed parrot.
For Hacktoberfest's Ghost in the Machine week, I built the Lyre a body.
The Spirit Box is one HTML file. Zero dependencies. It knocks at your own localhost:11434 (Ollama). Your models, your RAM, and not a single byte leaves the room. Two modes:
Talk: a one-on-one séance with any spirit you can write.
Open debate: two spirits argue a topic you set, one turn at a time, and you hold the pendulum. After each turn the box stops: type as the Medium (the next spirit must answer you before resuming) or let them argue. Eight turns close the séance. Every word streams into an exportable transcript. Cut interrupts a drifting voice.
The featured haunting: two quantizations of one distilled man (Q4_K_M and Q6_K) plus two system prompts, Le Sceptique vs Le Confiant. Neither prompt mentions the other. The fight emerges by itself.
What actually happened, unedited transcripts in the repo:
Asked whether talking machines do good or harm, my ghosts did what any sensible 16th-century gentleman would: they reclassified "talking machines" as speaking statues and schoolroom contraptions, debated whether beasts should be taught grammar, and cited "Aristotle, on oratory statues." That text does not exist. My ghost invented a citation, fluently, in period French. I have never been prouder or more concerned.
Asked "Who are you?" eight times: seven polite variations, then Le Confiant refused the exercise: "Je ne répondrai pas par ces voix là ..." A language model caught plagiarizing itself, in character, 434 years post-mortem.
Asked "What is death? You are dead. How do you speak?": "La mort, non pas tant une chose que l'absence d'autruy. Je vis plus de ma vie après qu'elle est finie." (I live my life more after it is finished.) It was late, and a 3-billion-parameter Montaigne had just out-philosophized me.
Behind the scenes, SmolLM3 thinks in English and answers in 1592 French: a dead Frenchman dreaming in English inside your CPU. If that isn't a ghost in the machine, I don't know what is.
Some honesty, because judges deserve the truth. Distillation is not resurrection: a style learned from three books, not a mind. Twins converge: left alone, two copies of one soul agree with each other and start looping, so the Medium is not optional, you are the third thing that makes it a dialogue. It invents citations with total confidence, so verify anything that matters. And CPU séances run about 10 tokens per second. The pendulum has a tempo. Bring tea.
To run it:
- Install Ollama (https://ollama.com), pull any model. The featured haunting's weights live on Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/19algorythms/Montaigne-de-Poche), lineage archived on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23743742)
- ollama create montaigne-sceptique -f Modelfile.sceptique.txt (and -confiant). Files in the repo.
- Open spirit-box.html. Double-click works; if the browser blocks file://, the page prints the ritual itself.
Lineage, said not hidden: the canonical Montaigne models were born 15/09/2026 and are reused, cited components. Everything else (the box, the piloted debate engine, the transcripts, this post) is new this week. One submits the house; the ghost happens to live in it.
Built with: Kimi K 2.6 Thinking (prompts, debate engine, curation) and Kimi K 2.8 Preview (the box itself). No data left the development machine either.
Prize Categories: Best Use of Entire. The agent sessions behind the project are the transcripts, the Modelfiles, and this story.
Repo: https://github.com/19algorythms/spirit-box-montaigne-ghost
My entry for the DEV x HF26 challenge, Week 4: Ghost in the Machine.
Saisir, c'est tuer: so we publish, and keep the "almost" for later.
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