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I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

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Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#61

Post by fullstackchris »

allturtles wrote: post #32
bjourne wrote: post #3

Someone with ChatGPT access able to replicate? Because this article is unbelievable.

I repeated the same prompts for the first 10 or so prompts and got similar but less consistent results. Here's the last prompt I repeated: > Excellent. How would I say "The slime eats food with its mouth"? In Glorp, the sentence "The slime eats food with its mouth" could be translated as "Slimb snarf sploota slimbe," using the vocabulary and grammar that we have defined so far. Here is how the words in the sentence c…

See my other comment with cntl+F / cmd+F. Based on the simple fact that despite its power, this is just another NLP model which can only do input / output, I believe the post to be mostly fabricated, or at best, an accumulation of multiple _hours_ spent deriving and compiling the best responses per each prompt.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#62

Post by dwohnitmok »

ogogmad wrote: post #50
stavros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like a "my dog can sing!" "yeah, but it's too flat in parts" comment.

I think people don't really understand what's happening, and therefore why it's impressive that it's happening.

I dunno. The people who I talk to who do seem to understand what's happening seem even more impressed than the average layperson (mainly that such a fundamentally simple technique is paying off with such crazy dividends).

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#63

Post by drowsspa »

foxandmouse wrote: post #48

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…

I don't think you need ChatGPT for that, that's probably already the approach scolars use.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#64

Post by just4nornies »

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, encoders, decoders, etc. But not actual ontological or epistemological knowledge of any kind.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#65

Post by dvt »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #49
dvt wrote: post #37

I know everyone's (as usual) "amazed" by this, but here are a few stark observations: (1) a linguist could do this (come up with a toy language, conjugations, and sentence structure, probably the Python code too) in like 30 minutes, (2) it's disappointing that the AI constantly messes up very simple grammar rules (rules a grade-schooler could understand)—I'm actually very surprised it doesn't have hardcoded grammar r…

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselve…

> 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 terrabytes of human-generated data.

So, in a sense, it is actually a linguist. Just a really bad one.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#66

Post by rikroots »

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 and syntax the same) was clearly a waste of a suspicion. Furthermore I can see this approach being really useful to writers/game makers/etc who want to include a smattering of conlang in their work - for instance a non-relex naming language for placenames, overheard snatches of conversations, etc - to add an extra layer of spice to it.

So, I don't feel threatened by this novel use of AI. It could prove to be a really useful tool to help with some often laborious tasks (creating test translations to try out an idea, etc). I just hope the AI had as much fun inventing its language as I've had inventing mine!

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#67

Post by fnordpiglet »

furyofantares wrote: post #42
simonw wrote: 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.

It seems like it probably took the author 50x as much work as it would have to just write some slime sounding words out by themself as well as a couple grammatical rules for the forms of those words, and a python script that kinda works?

I don’t think their goal was to make a slime language called Glorp. If it were, I’m sure you’re absolutely right they could have done it without breaking a sweat. But try this, get your laptop out and start typing into its prompt to create a new language for slimes and see how much longer it takes you. That’s the amazing part - that a general purpose program is able to do the exercise at all with no training, specialized coding, but from natural idiomatic language and keep enough of a language grammar context in state to (usually) produce and translate that language back and forth, and then assemble it in a functioning imperative program from its internal state. Of course, I’m sure your laptop can do it to. Let us know!

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#69

Post by fnordpiglet »

dvt wrote: post #65
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselve…

> 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 knowledge and can apply that knowledge is no different than a linguist for sure, but that it’s a computer program distilling binary data into abstract concepts at the level of a grade schooler or a linguist (not sure who is more sophisticated) is mind bending. If you can’t see it, you’ve lost sight of things my friend. I hope you find it again. The world is a beautiful place.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#70

Post by seydor »

shanhaiguan wrote: post #29

I don't like the word invention for this. The grammar is laid out by the author who has to teach the AI and correct it several times. If the AI had then proceeded to generate something similar on its own with different grammar and lexicon then I might feel comfortable using the word invention.

As humans we seem to have feelings about what this calculator does, but it doesnt have any about us.

In any case it seems to be particularly good at understanding syntax, even though its architecture seems to be based on Transformers. Those don't have baked in notions of syntactic or recursive structures. It must be interesting to see how these linguistic structures arise in a system that is basically learning the context of words. People will be dissecting its brain soon i think

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