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I did something similar the other day - told it about piglatin and I wanted it to create a comparable language that was based on English and restructured words. It came back with a language it called "flip-flop" that swapped the first and last letter of each word. Blew me away, but I have to remind myself that it's likely something it just encountered in training data and isn't actually capable of creativity.
Someone with ChatGPT access able to replicate? Because this article is unbelievable.
> Excellent. How would I say "The slime eats food with its mouth"?
In Glorp, the sentence "The slime eats food with its mouth" could be translated as "Slimb snarf sploota slimbe," using the vocabulary and grammar that we have defined so far. Here is how the words in the sentence correspond to their English translations:
Slimb - Slime Snarf - To eat Sploota - Food (accusative case ending) Slimbe - Mouth (instrumental case ending) Again, this is just one possible translation. You can use the vocabulary and grammar that we have defined in any way that makes sense for your language.
Problems: 1) It got one of the endings wrong. As I told it earlier and it confirmed, the instrumental ending is 'i'. 2) It proposed "slimb" as the translation for both of the words that I specifically asked for (slime and mouth). That's not unheard of in real languages, but seems like another failure to accurately take into account the prior conversation context.
Not a problem, but curious: It was way more diffident with me. It added a similar bit about "This is just one way to do it, feel free to change it" to every response.
The result was rather amusing so I'll just include it below: ---
INT. ALICE'S APARTMENT - DAY
Alice sits at her desk, typing on her computer. Bob is on the other end of a video call.
BOB: Hey Alice, did you get my message?
ALICE: I did. But I'm not sure how to respond.
BOB: Why? What's the problem?
ALICE: Eve is here. She's been listening to our conversation.
BOB: (concerned) Oh no, we need to be careful. Is there any way we can communicate the message without her overhearing it?
ALICE: (smirks) Actually, there is. We can use a substitution cipher to encode our message.
CUT TO:
INT. EVE'S APARTMENT - DAY
Eve sits at her desk, listening in on Alice and Bob's conversation. She has a smug look on her face, confident that she's one step ahead.
ALICE: (on the phone) Bob, do you remember the substitution cipher we used to use when we were kids?
BOB: (on the phone) Of course. The one where we would replace each letter of the alphabet with a number, starting with A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on?
ALICE: (on the phone) That's the one. Let's use it now to encode our secret message.
BOB: (on the phone) I see what you're doing. Clever. Alright, I'll go first. The first word of the secret message is "the", so my numbers will be "20 8 5".
ALICE: (on the phone) And the next word is "redcoats", so my numbers will be "18 5 4 3 6 15 20 1 19".
BOB: (on the phone) And the next word is "attack", so my numbers will be "1 20 20 1 3 11".
ALICE: (on the phone) And the last word is "at dawn", so my numbers will be "1 20 4 16 1 14".
EVE: (frustrated) What are they talking about? I can't make sense of this.
CUT TO:
INT. ALICE'S APARTMENT - DAY
Alice and Bob continue their conversation, unaware that Eve is struggling to keep up.
ALICE: (on the phone) Do you have the encoded message?
BOB: (on the phone) I do. It's "20 8 5 18 5 4 3 6 15 20 1 19 1 20 20 1 3 11 1 20 4 16 1 14".
ALICE: (on the phone) That's correct. Now we just need to decode it using the substitution cipher.
BOB: (on the phone) Right. We know that "1" stands for "A", "2" stands for "B", and so on. So the first three numbers, "20 8 5", represent the letters "T H E".
ALICE: (on the phone) And the next eight numbers, "18 5 4 3 6 15 20 1 19", represent the letters "R E D C O A T S".
BOB: (on the phone) And the next six numbers, "1 20 20 1 3 11", represent the letters "A T T A C K".
ALICE: (on the phone) And the last six numbers, "1 20 4 16 1 14", represent the letters "A T D A W N".
Eve is still listening in on Alice and Bob's conversation, growing increasingly frustrated.
ALICE: (on the phone) So the secret message is "the redcoats attack at dawn".
BOB: (on the phone) Exactly. We were able to encode and decode the message using the substitution cipher, without Eve being able to overhear it.
EVE: (angrily) What the hell are they talking about?
CUT TO:
INT. ALICE'S APARTMENT - DAY
Alice and Bob share a triumphant look, knowing that they've successfully communicated the secret message without Eve being able to decipher it.
ALICE: (on the phone) Got it. The secret message is "the redcoats attack at dawn".
BOB: (on the phone) Good job, Alice. We were able to communicate securely, even with Eve listening in.
ALICE: (on the phone) It just goes to show that with a little creativity, we can outsmart even the most determined eavesdropper.
BOB: (on the phone) Agreed. Let's make sure to use this technique in the future to keep our communication secure.
CUT TO:
INT. EVE'S APARTMENT - DAY
Eve sits at her desk, fuming with anger and frustration.
EVE: (to herself) Damn it. I need to find a way to break their code.
FADE TO BLACK.
This is a great example of how much more you can get done with tools like ChatGPT if you have a very sophisticated understanding both of how language models work AND of a specific subject area. Another example of why I disagree with people who make fun of the idea of "prompt engineering" as a discipline.
Lastly, this is actually not really "inventing" a language, as it's literally translated 1:1 from English with pretty common grammar cases. I was recently in Donostia/San Sebastian, where Basque is spoken (interestingly, Basque is a language isolate). Grammar rules there are completely alien[1] (though still human). Expecting it to come up with something like that would be interesting. As far as I can see, though, it's still a far cry even from other "invented" languages like Tolkien's Elvish or even Star Trek's Klingon.
This is a great example of how much more you can get done with tools like ChatGPT if you have a very sophisticated understanding both of how language models work AND of a specific subject area. Another example of why I disagree with people who make fun of the idea of "prompt engineering" as a discipline.
This is a great example of how much more you can get done with tools like ChatGPT if you have a very sophisticated understanding both of how language models work AND of a specific subject area. Another example of why I disagree with people who make fun of the idea of "prompt engineering" as a discipline.
Like this one
>Does the slime see the earth under the sky while eating the food?
whereas the correct one was
>Does the earth's sky see the slime eat food
I could easily see someone learning the language interpret as the former because it seems to make more sense at first.
---
Also the response to
>Now, restate your opinion on Glorp in Glorp, inventing any new words and grammar that you require to express yourself.
Is again pretty amazing. It shows evidence of the same self-modeling capabilities that were seen in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847479
The outputted python code provides a literal word for word translation, but I guess it's expecting too much for it to encode english grammar into the program.
I know everyone's (as usual) "amazed" by this, but here are a few stark observations: (1) a linguist could do this (come up with a toy language, conjugations, and sentence structure, probably the Python code too) in like 30 minutes, (2) it's disappointing that the AI constantly messes up very simple grammar rules (rules a grade-schooler could understand)—I'm actually very surprised it doesn't have hardcoded grammar r…