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I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

maximumeffort.substack.com

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Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#41

Post by simonw »

bitwize wrote: post #38
simonw wrote: post #18

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.

I've been prompt engineering for decades; I did it to fine-tune my results from Google (and even more importantly, pre-Google search engines).

I think the ability to use search engines well is another skill which highly technical audiences like those on Hacker News might habitually under-value.

When you've been using search engines for 20+ years it's easy to lose sight of quite how much skill can be involved in getting the best results out of them.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#42

Post by furyofantares »

simonw wrote: post #18

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.

It seems like it probably took the author 50x as much work as it would have to just write some slime sounding words out by themself as well as a couple grammatical rules for the forms of those words, and a python script that kinda works?

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#43

Post by kelseyfrog »

shanhaiguan wrote: post #29

I don't like the word invention for this. The grammar is laid out by the author who has to teach the AI and correct it several times. If the AI had then proceeded to generate something similar on its own with different grammar and lexicon then I might feel comfortable using the word invention.

Why don't you like it?

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#44

Post by Scarblac »

dvt wrote: post #37

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…

ChatGPT doesn't have much trouble writing in different languages (eg asking for "the same but In Dutch" seems to work well most of the time) which would be harder with hardcoded language rules, I think.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#45

Post by Baeocystin »

jmcgough wrote: post #22

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.

I'm curious why you felt that need to do so. (not snark! Genuine question.)

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#46

Post by stavros »

dvt wrote: post #37

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…

This reads like a "my dog can sing!" "yeah, but it's too flat in parts" comment.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#47

Post by djexjms »

dark-star wrote: post #15

Wow. This (especially the chat transcript) must be heavily edited, right? RIGHT? Please tell me it's edited for correctness.. Because this makes me both extremely in awe and also extremely uneasy at the same time...

The raw transcripts are linked to from the article.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#48

Post by foxandmouse »

This is pretty amazing, we could potentially use it to bring back dead languages. Currently we have a basic example of how ancient Egyptian would sound like because of the rosetta stone, but we could create a data model relating ancient Egyptian to what we already know of demotic and the other contemporary languages of the time (which we do know how to pronounce)

Good candidate words for this kind of correspondence are things like city or place names, people's/ruler's names and so forth.

However using poetry we can establish which words the people felt rhymed and hence that lets us better establish the phoneme sounds. Additionally jokes and plays on words can help us find homophones in the target language too.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#49

Post by fnordpiglet »

dvt wrote: post #37

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…

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselves are novel or unique, but they’re novel and unique for a a general purpose computer program to be so adaptive and flexible in both what it takes as input but also how it interprets that input into remarkably coherent and salient outputs.

Taking into account it’s a beta and that the underlying tech is really new, you can extrapolate that some of these gaps can be tackled - then will you be amazed?

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#50

Post by ogogmad »

stavros wrote: post #46
dvt wrote: post #37

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…

This reads like a "my dog can sing!" "yeah, but it's too flat in parts" comment.

I think people don't really understand what's happening, and therefore why it's impressive that it's happening.
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