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Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#32You can just ask it which subreddit would be good to post on in order to find out more details on this tablet from a subject matter expert.
Actually-- though I love the attempt to use AI on this problem-- you could probably get an answer in a fairly straightforward manner by contacting the museum. Curators (and knowledge organizers & cataloguers of all sorts like professional librarians) tend to very much enjoy the curiosity of the public into obscure niches. It might take time in terms of foot-speed, but the current staff could likely track down the rec…
their patience with biblical literalists who tout chatgpt hallucinations as evidence of biblical inerrancy may be limited
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#33I tried with some other undeciphered texts and I just got random translations that changed drastically with every attempt. Once I became skeptical, I tried to see if it could do a simple replacement cipher on English text, and it could not. I don’t think ChatGPT is a good fit for this kind of problem.
Wait until you ask it for quotes and stuff it literally makes up stuff and cites things that exist but not that page, etc
They’re generative models — it’s what you get
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#34A google search for their first prompt (ignoring, of course, the prompt intended to get chatgpt into "the right state of mind") "Can you speculate on how the biblical name of king Manasseh of Judah would have been written in Babylonian Cuneiform?" actually turns up the https://armstronginstitute.org/160-esarhaddon-prism-proves-k... link describing in detail the artifact they are interested in as the 5th result (4th i…
This is not the artifact the author is interested in since it is not written by a prisoner in a cell near Menasseh.
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#35There is indeed plenty of translated Akkadian in open-access papers that could have become part of ChatGPT's training set, so it's completely plausible that GPT might have learnt a thing or two about the Babylonian language. However, the questionable 'translation' number 55 casts doubt in my mind as to its accuracy: > They made Menasî king in Assur, established him as ruler in Babylon. Just from the history, surely t…
I think https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/ may be better for this in this case?
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#36Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#37[flagged]
Be careful not to ask it to write the Funniest Joke in the World [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World
I just found this page [1] lol
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#38I've played around with assigning it the task of phonetically transliterating English into other writing systems. It does a good job on things like Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese phonetic characters where there is a large corpus to work from and handle scenarios where 1:1 phonetic equivalence isn't available. Curiously it also does a passable job converting to long obsolete manyōgana (kanji used purely phonetically) despite there being no real corpus to learn from.
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#39[deleted]
Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
#40There is indeed plenty of translated Akkadian in open-access papers that could have become part of ChatGPT's training set, so it's completely plausible that GPT might have learnt a thing or two about the Babylonian language. However, the questionable 'translation' number 55 casts doubt in my mind as to its accuracy: > They made Menasî king in Assur, established him as ruler in Babylon. Just from the history, surely t…
I can confirm that GPT 4 fails pretty badly on Middle Egyptian texts that are outside of its training set, using both MdC encoding and transliteration. I get translations which have at most a word or two in common with the original text. Almost pure hallucination.
From 'do robots dream' to 'how do we make them stop'