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I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

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Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#221
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few safety checks you may be hitting when using chatgpt that are there to try and keep context of what it is (so it'll remind you it can't access the outside world). You can often get around them, but for example there's the work showing you can teach it to render svgs as valid markdown then ask for shapes and colours and get the output. If I ask it to render something though, it refuses telling me…

Yeah, I had a three hour thread with ChatGPT yesterday where we wrote a short story together. It was able to synthesize information about 2 main characters and a supporting cast of 3 others and keep it mostly straight the whole time. In fact, it kept getting better and better at predicting how those characters would respond given simple prompts. I had to stop every once in a while, though, and remind it what we were…

ChatGPT takes an input of 4096 tokens.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#222
post #165

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 asked how to configure something in PlatformIO and it told me it was possible to do exactly what I wanted, and gave me easy to use syntax with full examples and explanation. When I questioned it further, it pointed me to the URLs of docs covering the feature. None of it was in any way real - the feature I wanted does not actually exist.

I asked it for examples of drugs to treat high blood pressure, and it gave me a few real drugs that can be used for that purpose, plus one drug that entirely doesn't exist. No results on Google for that word.

However, the name sounded very much like it could be a drug name for a real blood pressure medication.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had a three hour thread with ChatGPT yesterday where we wrote a short story together. It was able to synthesize information about 2 main characters and a supporting cast of 3 others and keep it mostly straight the whole time. In fact, it kept getting better and better at predicting how those characters would respond given simple prompts. I had to stop every once in a while, though, and remind it what we were…

ChatGPT takes an input of 4096 tokens.

It does not appear to be that simple: https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1598874674204618753

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you tell it to “play correctly with the standard rules”?

I did, it even volunteered what those rules were, but when I asked it to keep a running score it always scored it as if paper beat scissors.

Perhaps it's under the impression that if paper beats rock, and rock beats scissor, then by transitivity paper should beat scissor.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#225

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…

Could it be that that there is a proprietary extension for HyperTalk, that chatGPT somehow learned about?

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#226
Should the author have been clear that the 10 nouns and 10 verbs it asked chatGPT to make up should all be unique?

I immediately see two made up verbs which are also made up nouns. Granted many human languages have this issue, but that's not necessarily a positive thing nor a goal.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#227
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.

> prompt engineering

Honestly, that's what several roles in software engineering do. People who gather requirements and design features are taking goals (possibly communicated imprecisely) by others and converts them into "prompts" which can be comprehended by a more specialized system (person/group) next in the chain.

Software architects and more senior engineers do this again, converting pretty good requirements into prompts which can be understood and acted upon by programmers. Sometimes they are the next step also. (We all do multiple iterations of refinement before we get to actual coding.)

So being good at designing prompts for chatGPT is not so unlike designing effective prompts for humans. The better you understand the prompt receiver and the goals, the more success you'll have prompting the next phase to generate something useful.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT takes an input of 4096 tokens.

It does not appear to be that simple: https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1598874674204618753

Interesting! I repeatedly asked for summaries of where we were so far, that may have helped my use cases.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#230

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…

I did a similar experiment, except that I started with phonology of the language, and it's pretty decent at that too if you want to get it to "sound like something". It does understand stuff like place and manner of articulation, how adjacent phonemes can affect each other etc.
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