191–200 of 267 posts
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Instead of thinking about this as an all-or-nothing outcome, consider how this might work if they were made accessible with LLMs, and then you used randomized spot checks with experts to create a clear and public error rate. Then, when people see mistakes they can fix them. I’m trying to do this for old Latin books at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. So many of the books have never been digitized, let alone…
These kinds of ideas just sound to me like "Suppose you had to use broken technology X. How do you make work?"
After using a keyboard for circa 50 years, I can't read my own handwriting. I can't even give a reproduceable signature.
Same here. Old enough to remember when your signature on a credit card receipt would be given a quick look to compare it to the scrawl on the back of the card. If this was still being done I’d probably fail 50% of the transactions I attempt.
Today I learned that in the us children are not taught cursive handwriting. This is rather absurd to me. How are they supposed to write?
I realize many legal documents are "signed" via keyboard, meaning you just need to type your name, but some things are still done via pen and paper.
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Those around me just write a lot more slowly, writing in print (they don’t connect the letters like in cursive, they can’t easily read my very-clean cursive either, which gives a feeling that my cursive is a sort of superpower)
I learned cursive in 2nd grade and was very strictly REQUIRED to use it up until high school, where they stopped requiring cursive. 1) My cursive was always slower than print. I was happy to go back to print so I could write fast. I went to school in the "analog" era, so 100% of all assignments were hand written and not typed. 2) I noticed that literally only 1 person in my school stayed with cursive when printing wa…
I thought having to lift pen repeatedly would be slower? Anyway I need to try to really know I guess! Versus the time taken to add those extra links.
Like most others I've not written much in years perhaps decades, that has screwed up my handwriting as even minor notes are these days illegible even to me after a few days
Thanks for the replies.. Cleared a few misconceptions... One of them being writing in blocks is somewhat 'childish' and cursive is more literate.
Added later: read parts of the long article it's very interesting.. Need to read it fully.
Is that true?! US kids don't learn cursive? How do they write?!
I learnt it here in Australia in my early school years, and hated it because it was both slower to write and more difficult to read. I switched back to standard writing as soon as I was allowed.
Before commenting asking about why they don't just use LLMs, please note that the article specifically calls out that they do, but it's not always a viable solution: > The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate. The document at the top is likely an especi…
Determining whether the latest off the shelf LLMs are good enough should be straight forward because of this: “Some participants have dedicated years of their lives to the program—like Alex Smith, a retiree from Pennsylvania. Over nine years, he transcribed more than 100,000 documents” Have different LLMs transcribe those same documents and compare to see if the human or machine is or accurate and by how much.
Curious, how hard is the sample in the article meant to be? I grew up (in the 1970s) in a world in which cursive still ruled. But the variant that we were taught in school was already considerably evolved from the one used by my grandparents, and those were modern compared to the archaic German script ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin ) so I've never thought of myself as good at reading cursive. And of c…
Here is an example of a non-expert compared to an expert reading aloud [0].
I learned cursive in school in the early 2000s, but I could never read my grandmother's handwriting. Whenever she mailed me a card, I would have to have my mom read it to me.
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LLMs improve significantly on state of the art OCR. LLMs can do contextual analysis. If I were transcribing these by hand, I would probably feed them through OCR + an LLM, then ask an LLM to compare my transcription to its transcription and comment on any discrepancies. I wouldn't be surprised if I offered minimal improvement over just having the LLM do it though.
Are you guessing, or are there results somewhere that demonstrate how LLMs improve OCR in practical applications?
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I mean, all you have to do is feed the image to ChatGPT, and it will read it basically as well as you can. Denying/downvoting reality is always an option, of course.
Can you feed these to ChatGPT and tell me what it says they say? https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs It gets them wrong for me, but maybe it will get them right for you. Maybe you're better at prompting or have access to a better model or something.
Still, here's the first one, via Gemini 2.0 experimental: https://i.imgur.com/HtnwfHp.png
How does the response look? Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least? Even if 100% made up, which I have a feeling it is, it's a more credible (not to mention creative) attempt than most non-specialists would come up with.
o1-pro, on the other hand, completely shat the bed: https://i.imgur.com/mivdjkA.png I haven't seen it fail like that in a LONG time, so good job, I guess. :) I resubmitted it by uploading the .jpg directly, and it mumbled something about a "Problem generating the response."
Second image:
Gemini 2.0 seemed to have more trouble with this one: https://i.imgur.com/oEktMP6.png
o1-pro gave another error message, but 4o did pretty well from what I can tell (agree/disagree?): https://i.imgur.com/7iR1y7U.png I thought it was interesting that it got the date wrong, as '1682' is pretty easy to make out compared to much of the text.
In summary, I think you broke o1-pro.
