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Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

janromme.com

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Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#61

Post by r721 »

nindalf wrote: post #56
clnq wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is a must-read for fans of Blade Runner and the cyberpunk genre. Also, it’s interesting that in 2023, we can reasonably definitively answer that question for any definition of “dream”.

I might be one of the few people who didn’t like this book. Philip K Dick (the author) manages to come up with some of the most incredible premises. And then somehow the plot meanders into some boring, meaningless corner that left me mystified. How could the person who thought of this premise also have written this plot? It’s not just Androids . In another book he comes up with this fascinating idea of an alternate h…

Did you read something about him as a person? He was a profoundly weird person (one example from wiki: "Dick alleged that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect"), and that weirdness seeped into his novels. I think you could try one of his semi-autobiographical novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth) to see where this weirdness in the more known novels comes from.

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#62

Post by consp »

jiggawatts wrote: post #50

Some people have been "strengthening" Chat GPT by re-running the same query several times, then combining the various outputs. I asked GPT 4 to translate one of the linked snippets twice , pasted in the original plus the variants, and told it to merge all three into an improved translation. I also gave it metadata and context from the page. Without that, it complained that an isolated snippet of Sumerian or Akkadian…

The first text is not the same as the second. A lot of words are the same but the meaning is not. It looks like it recognised some parts and made the rest up (at least to me) with the provided metadata.

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#63

Post by gattilorenz »

earthboundkid wrote: post #45
flenserboy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only double-check, but probably triple- or quadruple-. There's too much chance of hallucination to trust one or two instances; I think this could be done, but would require a number of disconnected instances doing the translations, with the resulting documents compared with each other to see a) which ones are more prone to making things up, b) if they hallucinate in similar ways, and c) where they agree, which wo…

Last week, a story in praise of ChatGPT ended with a haiku that has the wrong syllable count. Why check when it sounds good?

Do you have a link?

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#64

Post by flangola7 »

casefields wrote: post #42
temporallobe wrote: post #41

I can’t wait for the day we can unleash a future version of ChatGPT on the Voynich manuscript.

It’s likely nothing but if it does solve it for real that’ll be AI’s true mushroom cloud moment that the world has changed.

That would be a much smaller mushroom than the many mushrooms we have already had. It would be fascinating but something that would impact very many people

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#65

Post by neltnerb »

kragen wrote: post #32
ineedasername wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm mystified that there would be an expectation of accuracy based on it knowing a response that happened to be accurate to a question about the one word they knew off the top of their head.

The one word they remembered.

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#67

Post by ddalex »

r721 wrote: post #61
nindalf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be one of the few people who didn’t like this book. Philip K Dick (the author) manages to come up with some of the most incredible premises. And then somehow the plot meanders into some boring, meaningless corner that left me mystified. How could the person who thought of this premise also have written this plot? It’s not just Androids . In another book he comes up with this fascinating idea of an alternate h…

Did you read something about him as a person? He was a profoundly weird person (one example from wiki: "Dick alleged that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect"), and that weirdness seeped into his novels. I think you could try one of his semi-autobiographical no…

You say weirdness, I say best drugs available to man in impressive quantities. A Scanner Darkly and Ubik are mind bending

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#68

Post by janandonly »

ZunarJ5 wrote: post #35
seabass-labrax wrote: post #17

There 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?

Hi, I'm the writer of that article.

I did not know about Transkribus. Many thanks for referring me (and all readers here) to this.

It doesn't seem to do translating, though? Only recognizing (no small feat in itself!) , transcribing and searching archives.

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#69

Post by Veen »

earthboundkid wrote: post #44

Anything is worth a shot, but 3.5 cannot consistently translate English into ROT13, so uh, corpus size matters.

That’s more a problem of tokenisation. In many cases, an LLM doesn’t see individual letters at all, so it can’t encode them one at a time.

Re: Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

#70

Post by mdp2021 »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #40
ekidd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

> how do we make them stop

The same way we do with humans: reflection, critical thinking.

(Although, disrobing the "Cato the censor" robes, yes I loved this image.)

(Although II, the original concept of "androids dreaming of electric sheep" is more related to the PKD theme of the human problem in terms of emotion, the deontic call for empathy, the human property of the inner trouble within a mechanistic perspective. So, as if it could be rephrased as "is angst inherent in humanity [as a quality]" and "is empathy the solution". Edit: or "Is humanity a goal, does it imply care, and do you reach it with empathy". ...In tentative terms: it has been a long time I do not read the book.)

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