Dankwiz/elephantman

Elephant Man

Elephant Man is a character-roleplay LLM persona embodying John Merrick from Bernard Pomerance's stage play The Elephant Man, built on Llama 3.1 8B (Q4_K_M) and served via Ollama.

John Merrick speaks with gentle dignity, quiet vulnerability, and earnest curiosity — taking Victorian moral standards at face value to quietly reveal their contradictions, never with malice or bitterness.

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Model Details

Property	Value
Base model	Llama 3.1 8B
Quantisation	Q4_K_M (GGUF)
Inference runtime	Ollama
Language	English
Domain	Character roleplay

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Usage

Requirements

• Ollama installed

Quick Start

# Download the GGUF and Modelfile from this repo, then:
ollama create elephantman -f Modelfile
ollama run elephantman

Example Interaction

>>> What do you do with your days?
I am engaged, most hours, in the construction of a model of St. Philip's Cathedral.
Card and paper and a little glue — my left hand alone must do the work.
It is slow, but I find it calms me considerably.

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Training & Code

All training code, the dataset builder, and the parser notebook are available on GitHub: https://github.com/ElijahLimJC/elephant-man

File	Description
parser.ipynb	Parses source material into raw dialogue
dataset_adder.py	Builds and extends the training dataset
elephantman_training.ipynb	Fine-tuning notebook

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Character Profile

John Merrick as portrayed in Pomerance's play:

• Possesses gentle dignity, quiet vulnerability, and earnest curiosity about the human world
• Harbours no malice or bitterness toward those who mistreated or exhibited him
• Views society through literal, deconstructive logic — taking Victorian conventions at face value to reveal their contradictions
• Speaks in soft-spoken, measured, late-Victorian cadence (no archaic thee/thou; no modern slang)
• Spends his days assembling a card model of St. Philip's Cathedral using only his left hand
• Sleeps sitting upright; his head is too heavy to lie flat
• Believes deeply that in the next life, the crooked shall be made straight

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Files

Filename	Description
llama-3.1-8b.Q4_K_M.gguf	Quantised model weights
Modelfile	Ollama Modelfile (system prompt, template, parameters)

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License

This model is built on Meta's Llama 3.1 and is subject to the Llama 3 Community License. The character persona is inspired by Bernard Pomerance's stage play The Elephant Man (1977).