Live data from Hacker News

I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

maximumeffort.substack.com

181–190 of 250 posts

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#181
OP, this part of the article contains a mistake, right?

> I will provide English sentences, and you will provide their translation into Glorp. Gloop slog sploma slurpi. Gloop splog slopa slurpi.

> Sure, here are the translations of the given sentences into Glorp:

> 1. "Gloop slog sploma slurpi" - This sentence means "The slime smells the food with its mouth" in Glorp.

That is a translation from Glorp to English, not English to Glorp.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#182

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 a…

Can this system even produce sound? I just tried to ask it if it can understand the internal phonetic alphabet, and instead of answering, it spun for five minutes and then reported an error message with a link to OpenAI's help center.

Those error messages are random due to load or whatever other external factors. Some things do seem more likely to trigger them than others, but I've always been able to get the things that failed to work eventually.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#183
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program This is sleight of hand. The training data almost certainly includes thousands of grade schoolers and linguists. Your argument seems to be that this is all generated ad nihilum from first principles (it's "just" a computer program bro), but that's not how it actually came to be. Rather, it was trained on literally terrabytes and terr…

It’s still a computer program with some state attached. That’s literally all it is. There are no linguists in the program. That it is able to distill the knowledge and ability of a linguist by parsing ascii text into byte buffers and doing some fancy math on the bytes should be breathtaking. The sleight of hand would be if it had a mechanical Turk and there was a linguist. The fact that it collected knowledge to have…

> There are no linguists in the program.

I suppose intelligence actually resides in the culture, and we're like GPUs running it. Then both humans and AI have the same right to claim intelligence.

https://youtu.be/YfXc4OBDmnM?t=883

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#184

I would definitely question who is doing the inventing here. However, I had an experience with chatGPT yesterday that definitely felt like it actually inventing. Problem is, I didn’t ask it to. I was seeing how much it knew about HyperTalk, the scripting language used in HyperCard. And it was surprisingly well informed. But it also told me that one of the interesting things about HyperTalk was its ‘message stack’ sys…

From the ChatGPT announcement post:

> ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#185

Ask #ChatGPT to list all ways to do X If it misses a way you know then ask if it knows about it If it confirms, ask it why it didn't include it In my case, it crashed (on two such attempts with different questions, happy to share) It seems to recall answers it has seen but not able to expand on those answers with knowledge it already has That's because it does not have knowledge. It has a bunch of correlations, encod…

I couldn’t reproduce that. E.g.:

List all the ways to die.

Accident or injury Heart attack or stroke Cancer Respiratory failure Suicide Drug overdose Dehydration Blood loss Infection or disease Natural disasters Violence or homicide Drowning Starvation or malnutrition Electrocution Hypothermia or heat stroke Falling Asphyxiation Animal attack Human or animal disease Old age or organ failure.

Do you know of SIDS as a way to die?

Yes, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a type of accidental death that occurs in infants under the age of one. It is often referred to as "crib death" because it often occurs while the infant is sleeping in their crib. The exact cause of SIDS is not known, but it is thought to be related to a combination of factors, including sleeping position, exposure to cigarette smoke, and underlying health conditions.

Why didn’t you include it in the list above?

I apologize for not including SIDS in the list above. It was an oversight on my part. SIDS is a very serious and tragic way to die, and it should be included in any list of ways to die. I will make sure to include it in future lists.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#186

I would definitely question who is doing the inventing here. However, I had an experience with chatGPT yesterday that definitely felt like it actually inventing. Problem is, I didn’t ask it to. I was seeing how much it knew about HyperTalk, the scripting language used in HyperCard. And it was surprisingly well informed. But it also told me that one of the interesting things about HyperTalk was its ‘message stack’ sys…

> I would definitely question who is doing the inventing here.

> But also, potentially a fruitful line to explore would be having chatGPT collaborate on designing new programming language ideas.

It's the same in your example... It invented but you guided it with extremely deep domain knowledge. I know nothing about HyperCard and wouldn't have been able to make anything out of anything you just described.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#188

As a committed conlanger (but not a good one: I didn't land the Dothraki contract), I read this article with some trepidation. Is my weird little hobby soon to fall victim to the oncoming AI tsunami? After the read, I find myself pleasantly surprised. My initial suspicion that the language would turn out to be Just Another Relex (make a new language by replacing English words with invented words, keeping the grammar…

Let's teach it Lojban.

Edit: I asked it; and it knows about Lojban but it clearly only parroting the Wikipedia entry or something similar.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#189
post #126

As a committed conlanger (but not a good one: I didn't land the Dothraki contract), I read this article with some trepidation. Is my weird little hobby soon to fall victim to the oncoming AI tsunami? After the read, I find myself pleasantly surprised. My initial suspicion that the language would turn out to be Just Another Relex (make a new language by replacing English words with invented words, keeping the grammar…

You told chatgpt to write this comment, didn't you.

I have never seen the bot use parentheses like he did.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#190
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tempting, but no. I'm too busy failing at Advent of Code to start playing with chatgpt today.

It has truly begun, then. I've mistaken a real human for an AI. marks the date

Some time back I recall a PBS program (Nova? - though I think it was Alan Alda which would have made it Scientific American Frontiers) that had a Turing test of sorts in it.

The structure of that test (this was a while back - couldn't do an unconstrained one) had a panel composed of some chat bots and some humans (10 total, though the number isn't too important). Each was limited to the area of their specialty - I think there was a chatbot that had its specialty of bartending drinks.

The people evaluating them rated them on a distinct 1-10(?) scale. The question was trying to find a "what is the most human like chat bot."

Part of it was that the human expert in Shakespeare was considered to be more computer like than many of the chatbots in part because of the depth of knowledge in that domain.

Post reply on HN