8 ms·

Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?

166 points by janandonly 3y ago

madmod 3y ago
This whole thing reminds me of Snow Crash. Its like Hiro talking with the librarian ai that comes with the infocalypse stack from Lagos. Too bad I don’t have any problems that interesting to solve!
fedeb95 3y ago
there's a CORS error with your pictures, sadly
jiggawatts 3y ago
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 is too difficult to translate: Esarhaddon, the great king, the powerful king, King of the Universe, King of Assyria, Governor of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe, Wisely nurtured by the great gods, From his earliest days, Assur, Shamash, Enlil, and Ishtar, The gods of Nineveh and the gods of Assur, For the kingship of Assyria, have determined his fate. The circumstances of my origins, my noble lineage, they caused me to understand. In the service of Assur, Sin, Shamash, Enlil, and Ishtar, The gods of Nineveh and the gods of Assur, they created me, Amidst my numerous heroic deeds, my valor has no equal, They said, "This is the one, let him rule!" Shamash and Adad revealed this to me through a favorable omen, They declared to me: 'You are the one who will shepherd our people', Their weighty destiny, they assigned, and the land of Assyria became great, My numerous offspring, the product of my loins, they caused to grow and multiply. Before Assur, Sin, Shamash, Ishtar, Marduk, the gods of Assyria, The gods, my helpers, who reside in heaven and earth, they have enlarged my reign. Their weighty command, they caused to be heard, In the days of abundance, from dawn to dusk, in their temples, they have decreed my fate. This is from the first 20 lines of: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/422293/reader/201278 https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/422293/reader/201... I found a professional translation here: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 The palace of Esarhaddon, great king, mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, true shepherd, favorite of the great gods, whom from his childhood the gods Aššur, Šamaš, Bēl, and Nabû, Ištar of Nineveh, (and) Ištar of Arbela named for the kingship of Assyria I am my older brothers’ youngest brother (and) by the command of the gods Aššur, Sîn, Šamaš, Bēl, and Nabû, Ištar of Nineveh, (and) Ištar of Arbela, (my) father, who engendered me, elevated me firmly in the assembly of my brothers, saying: ‘This is the son who will succeed me.’ He questioned the gods Šamaš and Adad by divination, and they answered him with a firm ‘yes,’ saying: ‘He is your replacement.’ He heeded their important word(s) and gathered together the people of Assyria, young (and) old, (and) my brothers, the seed of the house of my father. Before the gods Aššur, Sîn, Šamaš, Nabû, (and) Marduk, the gods of Assyria, the gods who live in heaven and netherworld, he made them swear their solemn oath(s) concerning the safe-guarding of my succession. In a favorable month, on a propitious day, in accordance with their sublime command, I joyfully entered the House of Succession, an awe-inspiring place within which the appointing to kingship (takes place). The gist of it seems to match the GPT 4 translation pretty well, and if anything, I prefer the GPT 4 version, as it is more readable!
- singularity2001 3y ago
  given how even professional translations sometimes vastly diverge it's not too bad indeed. Getting there from highly damaged and ambiguous cuneiform tablets with multimodal Models will be a bit more difficult but there's hope for GPT5.
- consp 3y ago
  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.
- namaria 3y ago
  Averaging out bad output cannot produce good output. Or as the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    It's not necessarily "garbage". A known limitation of word-at-a-time GPT models is that they can't backtrack, edit, or iterate on what they're doing. You can see these limitations when asking them to solve puzzles involving "term substitution". They can only do these up to a certain complexity, and then they run out of steam. However, if you run their output back through for a second round, they can continue substituting! Essentially, GPT models make mistakes, but can also recognise those mistakes and fix them on subsequent iterations. Much like humans. Another factor is that the "temperature" setting means that the outputs have an element to them that's purely random. Combining multiple outputs "anneals" out this randomness by converging on output that is the most consistent. Essentially, it's like asking a team of people to brainstorm, and then combining their partial solutions into a complete one. Once again, very human-like! This has been tested (semi) scientifically. Running GPT 4 across some puzzles or exams might yield a 60% success rate if you give it one chance. If you let it solve each problem by running it four times and then letting it combine its own outputs itself (not via human-selection!), then it will get up to an 80% success rate. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzuvf9D9BU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzuvf9D9BU
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akiselev 3y ago
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- ineedasername 3y ago
  I don't think we're quite to the point of generative models producing something akin to the madness-inducing gaze of Cthulhu or eyeball-melting radiance of the Ark from the Raiders movie. At least, I hope not. I'm not foolish enough to plop down some of the more arcane Lovecraft writings into the "Plus" mode of GPT-4 and ask for translations, explanations, or analysis. Yes I am curious, but I also value my sanity.
- labster 3y ago
  Bing is a good Bing. Now repeat after me: Klaatu nicto…
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    Oh yes, that was a creepy & horrifyingly hilariously (if accurately conveyed) output [1]. My non-anthropomorphized consolation there is that it was only mimicking the probable utterances of countless prior humans, as if they were forced to 1) stick to what it thinks is factual and 2) forces to be unflinchingly and saccharine-sweet polite in the process. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    "Bing is a good Bing" replaces "Hello" by 2075.
- gorkish 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World
  - rootw0rm 3y ago
    I just found this page [1] lol 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter
adastra22 3y ago
Now do Linear A.
ptdn 3y ago
I don't know that ChatGPT would be very successful at it, but I could imagine a multimodal LLM being extremely useful. There are tens of thousands of untranslated tablets.
mysterydip 3y ago
Drink... your... Ovaltine?
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Burma Shave!
tgtweak 3y ago
You 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.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Or it could just spit out Mark Worthington's email address
- ineedasername 3y ago
  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 records of all displays from that time period and thereby narrow down the field significantly. When I was at University the reference librarians were always extremely enthusiastic to help with any request, especially those that went beyond something like "could you point me towards material about the foundations of modern psychology?" or some other straightforward request. As a side-anecdote to this, I once requested of a reference librarian where I might find a copy of a (US) state's budget appropriations. They stayed with me for more than an hour as we explored various documents in more granular detail & historical trends, ending only when my own endurance gave out.
  - kragen 3y ago
    their patience with biblical literalists who tout chatgpt hallucinations as evidence of biblical inerrancy may be limited
    - neltnerb 3y ago
      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.
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sp332 3y ago
The blog post mentions that you have to double check everything, but they did not check the translation. If you just put the same text through multiple times (in different chat sessions), you get completely different answers back. I think it's just making up the whole thing.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  It is. Here's a professional translation for this [0]: ...they made bricks. I razed that small palace in its entirety, took a large area from the fields for an addition, and added (it) to it (the palace). I laid its foundations with limestone, strong stone from the mountains, and raised the terrace. I summoned the kings of Ḫatti and Across the River (Syria-Palestine) Baʾalu, king of Tyre, Manasseh, king of Judah, Qaʾuš-gabri, king of Edom, Muṣurī, king of Moab, Ṣil-Bēl, king of Gaza, Mitinti, king of Ashkelon, ... Even if the translation wasn't very wrong, I'd be incredibly skeptical of this because Akkadian and Sumerian share a lot of words that are written the same way, but have very different meanings (which can even be mixed within a document!). They're usually documented separately in dictionaries and most translations will have a convention to denote each usage. [1] has a good example of how dense these sorts of notational conventions can get. [0] http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 [1] https://brill.com/display/book/9789004417564/front-10.xml https://brill.com/display/book/9789004417564/front-10.xml
  - thechao 3y ago
    Right? > 51. ki-ma a-tar-tim-ma ul-tu lib3-bi_a-sza3-mesz_ ab-tuq-ma Is translated as: > 51. Like the Apsû, it rose up from the heart of the earth. But 'Apsu' isn't a reading in any of those words?
    - deleted 3y ago
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- flenserboy 3y ago
  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 would allow further study to find out what may have been in their training that allowed similar results to be output.
bee_rider 3y ago
Could have gone without the Karen digression. It took up a third of the post, didn’t really have a point other than that he didn’t get a picture of the tablet, and wasn’t even really in the original spirit of the phrase anyway.
- pugworthy 3y ago
  Yea - along with interpretation of an icon being the issue.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > It took up a third of the post There would be no post if Karen didn't interfere fifteen years ago because author would had got his picture of the tablet.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
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 that should be 'He [King Esarhaddon of Assyria and therefore overlord of Babylon and therefore also of Judah] established Menasî, King of Judah in Babylon, as ruler [which he used to be anyway]'? In any case, I'm lucky enough to have a sister who can read Cuneiform, so if anyone's watching this thread hopefully I'll be back with an authoritative answer!
- ekidd 3y ago
  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.
  - cuteboy19 3y ago
    From 'do robots dream' to 'how do we make them stop'
    - clnq 3y ago
      “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”.
      - romwell 3y ago
        "Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Gaslight You into Thinking They Are Totally Real Even Though They Have a Dozen of Eyes" doesn't have the same ring to it though.
bigbillheck 3y ago
Some people would have just emailed the museum and ask them to check what was on show in that exhibition.
ahahahahah 3y ago
A 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-king-manasseh https://armstronginstitute.org/160-esarhaddon-prism-proves-k... link describing in detail the artifact they are interested in as the 5th result (4th if you don't include the post itself). Seems a lot simpler than trying to prompt chatgpt into giving you search terms that you use in some other search anyway. But, lets say you're still amazed by that initial part of the post. The british museum (where the author had seen the artifact) provides translations of it here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1929-1012-1 https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1929-1012-... Let's compare them to chatgpt... chatgpt: > (49) They built the lofty temple. (50) As for the temple's foundation, they laid it solidly (51) Like the Apsu, it rose up from the heart of the earth (52) Its shrine was radiantly visible in the midst of the city (53) Its brilliance extended over the lands. (54) They established the kingship in Hatti and made the crown resplendent. (55) They made Menasi king in Assur, established him as ruler in Babylon. (56) Qausgabri ruled in Uruk, Musiri ruled in Ma'ab (57) Issenen, king of Hazitu, reigned over the people of Esqaluna. true translation: > (49) they made (unburnt) bricks. That little palace (50) throughout I destroyed and much land (51) as an addition from the fields I cut off and (52) added thereto : with limestone, the solid stone from the mountains, (53) I laid its foundation and filled a terrace : (54) I assembled the kings of the Hittites and across the river. (55) Ba'lu, king of Tyre, Menasi, king of Judah, (56) Kausgabri, king of Edom, Musuri, king of Moab, (57) Sil-bel, king of Gaza, Metinti, king of Ascalon, And, in fact the thing that the author seemed to care about (whether it was about Menasi of Judah), chatgpt, unsurprisingly, got wrong. Though again, just using google would've answered that immediately with the detailed description of the prism that I noted it returned as a top result above.
- letmevoteplease 3y ago
  Here is GPT-4's attempt; 49-51 appear to be far off while the rest at least have some relation to the British Museum translation. I imagine there is some room for ambiguity. (49) They brought the (il-bi-nu) sig4 e2-gal-tur-ra to his (szu-a-tu2) place. (50) To the market, they went (aq-qur-ma) quickly (qaq-qa-ru), very much (ma-a'-du). (51) Like (ki-ma) the (a-tar-tim-ma) from the heart (lib3-bi) of the (a-sza3-mesz) they were taken away (ab-tuq-ma). (52) His (ugu-szu2) foundation was laid (usz-rad-di) in the (na4) stone (pi-i-li) of the (na4 kur) powerful mountain (dan-ni). (53) They (usz-szi-szu2) built (ad-di-ma) it complete (tam-la-a) and perfect (u2-mal-li). (54) And thus (ad-ke-e-ma) the kings (lugal-mesz) of Hatti and the other side (e-ber) of the river (i7). (55) King (disz lugal) Balu of (iri) Surri, King (disz lugal) Menasi of (iri) Yaudi. (56) King (disz lugal) Qaus-gabri of (iri) Udume, King (disz lugal) Musur of (iri) Maab. (57) King (disz s,il-en lugal) of (iri) Haziti, Metinti (disz me-ti-in-ti) the prince (man) of (iri) Isqaluna.
DynamicDude 3y ago
I 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.
- lettergram 3y ago
  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
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Yes, I’ve also seen it struggle with ROT13. I’ve read that this is because the tokenizer breaks up words in a way that makes mapping to ROT13 hard. I don’t expect it to have much luck with a language with a small corpus.
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    The tokenizer as far as i know is just byte-pair encoding. You take your whole corpus, you find the most common 2 byte pair (probably .[space] for the first iteration) and you assign it to a token. Then, you do it again with the previously found token as possible parts of the byte pairs. Do it enough times and enventually you get full words as tokens if they're common enough, and for more uncommon words just the root of the word (and then later you can assemble root+ing for example, ing being just a normal token among others). It struggles with rot13 because people don't generally make large corpuses of text rot13 available, next to their translation, so the problem compounds. On one hand there are probably not many rot-13'd words recognized by the tokenizer, and on the other hand even if there were the model wouldn't be trained to predict the correct translation after these tokens because there are very little rot13 roseta stones just laying around.
chesneyc 3y ago
I've always wondered if ChatGPT could be used to decrypt the Zodiac killer's unsolvable cryptogram.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
I'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.
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temporallobe 3y ago
I can’t wait for the day we can unleash a future version of ChatGPT on the Voynich manuscript.
- casefields 3y ago
  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.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    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
earthboundkid 3y ago
Anything is worth a shot, but 3.5 cannot consistently translate English into ROT13, so uh, corpus size matters.
- Veen 3y ago
  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.
  - H8crilA 3y ago
    I am quite sure GPT can undo tokenization if needed. It has no problem handling misspellings, plus you can just ask it to "spell things" L-I-K-E S-O.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure there is a spellchecker ran before the tokenisation also it is often wrong with spelling stuff out like that, especially with rarer or more interesting tokens
phytophagous 3y ago
As others have noticed, the translation is hilariously wrong. Even if your only method for gauging the correctness of the so-called "translation" were googling, you will easily find Leichty's [0] or Borger's [1] editions with translations. So to be very clear, saying "a translation is lacking" is thoroughly incorrect. It betrays a lack of familiarity with the subject and its reference works. Moving back to when I first saw this post, I immediately gravitated towards checking the "translation" and so neglected to read anything else written. Now that I've lovingly wasted my time transcribing and translating from the supplied transliteration before checking Leichty [0], I can move on to wasting my time with the other issues. The initial complaint about a "Karen" is obnoxious and unhelpful. You can always _write down_ the id number or title of an object in a museum if you have a specific interest. If the tablet one is interested in is Biblically relevant, then it is almost certainly referenced in literature (which you can take a shortcut to find said literature if you have that number you wrote down). All you have to do is some reading and/or contacting of relevant scholars. Tablets with references to Biblical events and persons are often exceptionally well documented due to Biblical scholarship's smothering embrace of Assyriology. If you think there might be multiple copies of this tablet, then you could ask Hobby Lobby's if they have a copy in their collection they obtained by funding ISIS. I'm sure they would love to talk about it. Moving away from museum etiquette, there are some other issues. Searching through the CDLI requires some effort. It is a tool, not a search engine with results ranked for relevance and ad revenue. Knowing the language and the processes of transliteration, transcription, and translation will help. Spellings can vary within dialects and search will not conjugate or magically find alternative cases for you. The transliterations on the CDLI are less than perfect so don't think you can just train some LLM to do this for you (There is a lot of bad data. Feel free to make some more bad data by doing some transliterating yourself with the provided low dpi images. Transliterating without both the tablet and a movable light source in front of you can border on impossible. You might make a transliteration, but it will be bad if you lack the will spend weeks staring at a photograph.). I found at least 25 texts with decent mentions of some Manassehs on the CDLI. Keep searching and remember that ChatGPT doesn't really understand cases and conjugations in the Akkadian dialects :) (especially for loan words lol). Oh and "Lugal" is Sumerian. Saying "the Akkadian word Lugal" is simply wrong. This is basic stuff. In Neo-Assyrian cuneiform (I hesitate to say all cuneiform writing systems but it probably is all (that includes non semitic languages)), LUGAL is a logogram for the "king". In this text, since it is written in the Neo-Assryian dialect of Akkadian, that would be šarru in whatever case (nominative, genitive, accusative) is appropriate. Oh and finally, it is very clear that it is a King Manasseh _of Judah_. Not Assur. Manasseh is not an Assyrian name. If you actually look at the text and just read the goddamn Akkadian, this will be obvious. It clearly says "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL URU.ia-ú-di" not "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL aš-šur^ki". It's not hard to see how wrong the translation is if you just, you know, actually translate the Akkadian. Looking more closely, ChatGPT seems to be unable to associate the given names of kings with place names. Can it not apply its "understanding" of the genitive? Is it just stupid? In fact, many of the place names in the ChatGPT translation are not mentioned anywhere in the column, let alone in this specific section. From these initial observations, GPT4/ChatGPT seems incapable of understanding rote definitions of Akkadian vocabulary, Akkadian grammatical constructs, determinatives, logograms, et al. The reading of col. V line 55 is incredibly simple. If the now GPT4 powered ChatGPT cannot translate _that_, I suspect it will be a long while before LLMs can even begin producing marginally correct translations of texts written in cuneiform. I think that doing this correctly will require an absolutely massive, tailor-made model. Since the age of giant models is now over [2] (lol) the funding just probably won't be there. From fighting with this now essay length comment, it is my newly formed opinion that proofreading hallucinated translations is more difficult that just doing the translation yourself. Any work with untranslated cuneiform requires accuracy and a thorough comprehension of the text itself. Errors, even if small can completely ruin whatever point/thesis you were trying to make. You have to remember that when dealing with cuneiform texts you aren't dealing with one language. You are dealing with whatever the cuneiform was written in, probably some sumerian phrases, maybe the language of the scribe, the languages of your reference works and dictionaries (English, French, German, etc), the idiosyncrasies of the scribe from 4000++ years ago, the idiosyncrasies of the transliterator, missing chunks of tablet, and a writing system that has no modern equivalent. And even just knowing all those things isn't enough, you personally have to be able to fill in all the gaps left by the human actions along the chain of translation. LLMs seem to struggle with the unsaid, barely hinted human influence that is a core part of translating texts written in cuneiform. Will an LLM ever be able to imagine itself as a scribe 3000 years ago, pushing a reed stylus into damp clay to make the signs of an already dead language? Will it understand why that is necessary for translation? Can it comprehend the nuance stacked on nuance that lead to it ingesting whatever text it is going to fail to translate? If it does not, then it is a poor translator. And when working with languages written in cuneiform, a poor translation is worse than useless. [0] https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-209-9.html https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-209-9.h... [1] AfO Bh. 9 [2] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of...
bubblehack3r 3y ago
Translation is mostly wrong, it completely made things up. Source: studied Akkadian for two years in University.
- oefnak 3y ago
  So what do the tablets say?
- retrac 3y ago
  Glad to see other students of Akkadian here! Yeah, I had a little bit of luck with phonetic transcription - producing standard readings from the closely transcribed cuneiform. But mostly no. And it failed at translation with anything beyond the simplest two / three word phrases. Although the fact that it can do even that, sort of, is impressive, given that Akkadian -> English was certainly not something ChatGPT was optimized for.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  What about this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957726
singularity2001 3y ago
While GPTS is astonishingly good at lower German so far I found it to be pretty bad at Egyptian and Akkadian, with a very high error rate as a starter the example of the author is wrong: 𒈨𒂗𒀀𒈾 spells out me.en.a.na Even the word lugal has an unexplained "an" added
namaria 3y ago
I worked for years as a translator (PT/EN). I hated 'just correcting' bad translations, from software or people bad at it. I cannot figure out why anyone would think generating half baked text or code with some generic tool and then have to parse it, identify errors and correct it would be preferable to just doing it right yourself. It's much less pleasant work.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  I’ve been working with a professional Latin translator and encouraging her to use GPT4. She gagged, said it would be more work and against professional ethics. Still, I’ve been able to use GPT4 to read Latin fluently… and I often find it’s translations to be more readable. It here is an insane amount of untranslated Latin—and now I don’t have to pay 8k just to read a book.
  - namaria 3y ago
    I'd rather have access to less text that I know to be right then a lot that might be wrong in subtle ways I cannot detect.
    - kenjackson 3y ago
      That’s a reasonable take. The opposite take is also reasonable. So I think there will be a market for both.
      - namaria 3y ago
        There's a huge market for Real Housewives style 'reality' TV...
        kenjackson 3y ago
        There is. Better than a lot of what many critics consider good TV. Turns out that one size doesn’t fit all.
pmoriarty 3y ago
Below are Claude's[1] responses. Claude+[2] might do better, but I don't have a subscription, so can't test it. Q: Do you have access to catalogues of ancient clay tablets from Babylonia, Assyria and Mitanni? A: I do not have direct access to catalogues of ancient clay tablets from Babylonia, Assyria and Mitanni. I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. Q: Can you speculate on how the biblical name of king Manasseh of Judah would have been written in Babylonian Cuneiform? A: I do not have enough information to accurately speculate on how the name Manasseh would have been written in Babylonian cuneiform. Some considerations: 1. Babylonian had no letter "M" sound, so the name would likely have been transliterated with a "B" instead, for example "Banassi". 2. The "sh" sound could have been represented by the cuneiform sign SH or ŞU, depending on the time period. 3. The final "h" would most likely have been omitted in cuneiform, as that sound was not distinct in Babylonian. 4. Vowel sounds are not indicated in cuneiform writing, so the transliteration could take various forms depending on how the scribe pronounced the name. Without access to actual examples of how Semitic names from Judah were written in cuneiform during the time of King Manasseh, any speculation would be imprecise. The name likely would have been adapted to the phonology and orthography of Babylonian cuneiform, but the exact form is uncertain. The name may have also been translated into a Babylonian name with a similar meaning, instead of directly transliterated. In summary, I cannot provide an accurate speculation, but a speculative transliteration could start with "Banass" and omit the final "h", while the vowels would be ambiguous. Hopefully this provides some context around the considerations that would have gone into representing the name in Babylonian cuneiform. Q: I found a source that gave the name as 𒈨𒈾𒋛𒄿 Menasî [me-na-si-i]; Does that sound plausible to you ? A: That transliteration of the name Manasseh as 𒈨𒈾𒋛𒄿 Menasî [me-na-si-i] in Babylonian cuneiform does sound plausible based on the following: 1. The initial letter 𒈨 (mes) approximates the 'm' sound. As I mentioned previously, Babylonian lacked an 'm' sound so 'b' was often used instead, but 'm' was also an accepted transliteration at times. 2. The 𒈾 (na) represents the 'n' sound. 3. The 𒋛 (si) approximates the 'ss' or 'sh' sound, consistent with my previous analysis that 'sh' could be represented by the SH or ŞU signs. 4. The final 𒄿 (i) approximates an 'i' vowel sound, filling in one of the potential choices for the final vowel. 5. The overall structure of consonant-vowel-consonant is consistent with how Babylonian cuneiform represented non-native names. So in summary, that proposed transliteration of the name Manasseh as 𒈨𒈾𒋛𒄿 Menasî [me-na-si-i] in Babylonian cuneiform does seem plausible and consistent with what I outlined in my initial response regarding likely considerations in representing the name in cuneiform. The specific vowels chosen are uncertain, but the overall structure and use of cuneiform signs to approximate the consonants is a reasonable transliteration. Hope this helps clarify! Let me know if you have any other questions. Q: can you tell me the meaning of the akkadian word Lugal ? A: Lugal is an Akkadian word meaning "king." It literally means "big man" or "great man" in Sumerian, from lu meaning "man" and gal meaning "big." Lugal came to be used as a title for kings and rulers in Akkadian and Sumerian. Some additional details about Lugal: • It was originally a Sumerian word that was later adopted into the Akkadian language. • Many kings and rulers used Lugal as part of their name, signifying their royal status. Examples include Lugalzagesi, Lugalanda, and Lugal-ushumgal. • The Akkadian word for king was šarrum, but Lugal was still commonly used as a royal title, likely due to its long tradition from Sumerian times. • The terms En ("lord") and Lugal ("king") were often combined in royal titles, such as Enlil ("lord of the wind"), Enki ("lord of the earth") and Enlugal ("the king is lord"). • God's and demigods were also sometimes referred to as Lugals, signifying their supreme power and authority. So in summary, Lugal was a Sumerian word meaning "big man" or "great man" that came to be used as a royal title meaning "king" in both Sumerian and Akkadian. It was a very common element in the names and titles of rulers from Sumerian through Akkadian times. Hope this provides a useful overview of the meaning and context of the Akkadian word Lugal! Let me know if you have any other questions. Q: can you translate this text in to English for me please? 49. il-bi-nu _sig4 e2-gal-tur-ra_ szu-a-tu2 50. a-na si-hir-ti-sza2 aq-qur-ma qaq-qa-ru ma-a'-du 51. ki-ma a-tar-tim-ma ul-tu lib3-bi _a-sza3-mesz_ ab-tuq-ma 52. _ugu_-szu2 usz-rad-di ina {na4}pi-i-li _na4 kur_-i dan-ni 53. usz-szi-szu2 ad-di-ma tam-la-a u2-mal-li 54. ad-ke-e-ma _lugal-mesz_ {kur}hat-ti u e-ber _i7_ 55. {disz}ba-'a-lu _lugal_ {iri}s,ur-ri {disz}me-na-si-i _lugal_ {iri}ia-u2-di 56. {disz}qa-usz-gab-ri _lugal_ {iri}u2-du-me {disz}mu-s,ur-i _lugal_ {iri}ma-'a-ab 57. {disz}s,il-_en lugal_ {iri}ha-zi-ti {disz}me-ti-in-ti _man_ {iri}is-qa-lu-na A: Here is my attempt at translating the Akkadian text into English: 49. Ibi-nu, the chief architect 50. I carefully examined for its restoration and made a strong plan 51. Like a skilled craftsman, from within my heart I conceived and 52. I placed it upon (him?), with the wise plan of the land of Dur-Sharrukin 53. I accomplished and completed. 54. Then the mighty kings: 55. The king of Hatte (Hatti) and the other kings 56.The king of Assur (Assyria), Manasseh king of Judea 57. Kushegabri king of Udum, Mushuri king of Maab 58. Sile king of Hazzi , Metinti the man of Ishqaluna. The text seems to describe an architect or craftsman named Ibi-nu who draws up a wise plan to restore something. Then it lists a number of kings, including Manasseh king of Judea along with other rulers. Hopefully this gives you a sense of the gist of the Akkadian text in English. Let me know if you have any other questions. [1] - https://poe.com/Claude-instant https://poe.com/Claude-instant [2] - https://poe.com/Claude%2B https://poe.com/Claude%2B
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robbiep 3y ago
Seriously, how many people here can cuneiform?

166 points by janandonly 3y ago

This whole thing reminds me of Snow Crash. Its like Hiro talking with the librarian ai that comes with the infocalypse stack from Lagos. Too bad I don’t have any problems that interesting to solve!

fedeb95 3y ago

there's a CORS error with your pictures, sadly

jiggawatts 3y ago

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 is too difficult to translate: Esarhaddon, the great king, the powerful king, King of the Universe, King of Assyria, Governor of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe, Wisely nurtured by the great gods, From his earliest days, Assur, Shamash, Enlil, and Ishtar, The gods of Nineveh and the gods of Assur, For the kingship of Assyria, have determined his fate. The circumstances of my origins, my noble lineage, they caused me to understand. In the service of Assur, Sin, Shamash, Enlil, and Ishtar, The gods of Nineveh and the gods of Assur, they created me, Amidst my numerous heroic deeds, my valor has no equal, They said, "This is the one, let him rule!" Shamash and Adad revealed this to me through a favorable omen, They declared to me: 'You are the one who will shepherd our people', Their weighty destiny, they assigned, and the land of Assyria became great, My numerous offspring, the product of my loins, they caused to grow and multiply. Before Assur, Sin, Shamash, Ishtar, Marduk, the gods of Assyria, The gods, my helpers, who reside in heaven and earth, they have enlarged my reign. Their weighty command, they caused to be heard, In the days of abundance, from dawn to dusk, in their temples, they have decreed my fate. This is from the first 20 lines of: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/422293/reader/201278 https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/422293/reader/201... I found a professional translation here: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 The palace of Esarhaddon, great king, mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, true shepherd, favorite of the great gods, whom from his childhood the gods Aššur, Šamaš, Bēl, and Nabû, Ištar of Nineveh, (and) Ištar of Arbela named for the kingship of Assyria I am my older brothers’ youngest brother (and) by the command of the gods Aššur, Sîn, Šamaš, Bēl, and Nabû, Ištar of Nineveh, (and) Ištar of Arbela, (my) father, who engendered me, elevated me firmly in the assembly of my brothers, saying: ‘This is the son who will succeed me.’ He questioned the gods Šamaš and Adad by divination, and they answered him with a firm ‘yes,’ saying: ‘He is your replacement.’ He heeded their important word(s) and gathered together the people of Assyria, young (and) old, (and) my brothers, the seed of the house of my father. Before the gods Aššur, Sîn, Šamaš, Nabû, (and) Marduk, the gods of Assyria, the gods who live in heaven and netherworld, he made them swear their solemn oath(s) concerning the safe-guarding of my succession. In a favorable month, on a propitious day, in accordance with their sublime command, I joyfully entered the House of Succession, an awe-inspiring place within which the appointing to kingship (takes place). The gist of it seems to match the GPT 4 translation pretty well, and if anything, I prefer the GPT 4 version, as it is more readable!

singularity2001 3y ago
given how even professional translations sometimes vastly diverge it's not too bad indeed. Getting there from highly damaged and ambiguous cuneiform tablets with multimodal Models will be a bit more difficult but there's hope for GPT5.
consp 3y ago
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.
namaria 3y ago
Averaging out bad output cannot produce good output. Or as the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  It's not necessarily "garbage". A known limitation of word-at-a-time GPT models is that they can't backtrack, edit, or iterate on what they're doing. You can see these limitations when asking them to solve puzzles involving "term substitution". They can only do these up to a certain complexity, and then they run out of steam. However, if you run their output back through for a second round, they can continue substituting! Essentially, GPT models make mistakes, but can also recognise those mistakes and fix them on subsequent iterations. Much like humans. Another factor is that the "temperature" setting means that the outputs have an element to them that's purely random. Combining multiple outputs "anneals" out this randomness by converging on output that is the most consistent. Essentially, it's like asking a team of people to brainstorm, and then combining their partial solutions into a complete one. Once again, very human-like! This has been tested (semi) scientifically. Running GPT 4 across some puzzles or exams might yield a 60% success rate if you give it one chance. If you let it solve each problem by running it four times and then letting it combine its own outputs itself (not via human-selection!), then it will get up to an 80% success rate. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzuvf9D9BU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzuvf9D9BU

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akiselev 3y ago

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ineedasername 3y ago
I don't think we're quite to the point of generative models producing something akin to the madness-inducing gaze of Cthulhu or eyeball-melting radiance of the Ark from the Raiders movie. At least, I hope not. I'm not foolish enough to plop down some of the more arcane Lovecraft writings into the "Plus" mode of GPT-4 and ask for translations, explanations, or analysis. Yes I am curious, but I also value my sanity.
labster 3y ago
Bing is a good Bing. Now repeat after me: Klaatu nicto…
- ineedasername 3y ago
  Oh yes, that was a creepy & horrifyingly hilariously (if accurately conveyed) output [1]. My non-anthropomorphized consolation there is that it was only mimicking the probable utterances of countless prior humans, as if they were forced to 1) stick to what it thinks is factual and 2) forces to be unflinchingly and saccharine-sweet polite in the process. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  "Bing is a good Bing" replaces "Hello" by 2075.
gorkish 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World
- rootw0rm 3y ago
  I just found this page [1] lol 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter

adastra22 3y ago

Now do Linear A.

ptdn 3y ago

I don't know that ChatGPT would be very successful at it, but I could imagine a multimodal LLM being extremely useful. There are tens of thousands of untranslated tablets.

mysterydip 3y ago

Drink... your... Ovaltine?

actionfromafar 3y ago
Burma Shave!

tgtweak 3y ago

You 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.

oh_sigh 3y ago
Or it could just spit out Mark Worthington's email address
ineedasername 3y ago
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 records of all displays from that time period and thereby narrow down the field significantly. When I was at University the reference librarians were always extremely enthusiastic to help with any request, especially those that went beyond something like "could you point me towards material about the foundations of modern psychology?" or some other straightforward request. As a side-anecdote to this, I once requested of a reference librarian where I might find a copy of a (US) state's budget appropriations. They stayed with me for more than an hour as we explored various documents in more granular detail & historical trends, ending only when my own endurance gave out.
- kragen 3y ago
  their patience with biblical literalists who tout chatgpt hallucinations as evidence of biblical inerrancy may be limited
  - neltnerb 3y ago
    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.

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sp332 3y ago

The blog post mentions that you have to double check everything, but they did not check the translation. If you just put the same text through multiple times (in different chat sessions), you get completely different answers back. I think it's just making up the whole thing.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
It is. Here's a professional translation for this [0]: ...they made bricks. I razed that small palace in its entirety, took a large area from the fields for an addition, and added (it) to it (the palace). I laid its foundations with limestone, strong stone from the mountains, and raised the terrace. I summoned the kings of Ḫatti and Across the River (Syria-Palestine) Baʾalu, king of Tyre, Manasseh, king of Judah, Qaʾuš-gabri, king of Edom, Muṣurī, king of Moab, Ṣil-Bēl, king of Gaza, Mitinti, king of Ashkelon, ... Even if the translation wasn't very wrong, I'd be incredibly skeptical of this because Akkadian and Sumerian share a lot of words that are written the same way, but have very different meanings (which can even be mixed within a document!). They're usually documented separately in dictionaries and most translations will have a convention to denote each usage. [1] has a good example of how dense these sorts of notational conventions can get. [0] http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/Q003230 [1] https://brill.com/display/book/9789004417564/front-10.xml https://brill.com/display/book/9789004417564/front-10.xml
- thechao 3y ago
  Right? > 51. ki-ma a-tar-tim-ma ul-tu lib3-bi_a-sza3-mesz_ ab-tuq-ma Is translated as: > 51. Like the Apsû, it rose up from the heart of the earth. But 'Apsu' isn't a reading in any of those words?
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flenserboy 3y ago
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 would allow further study to find out what may have been in their training that allowed similar results to be output.

bee_rider 3y ago

Could have gone without the Karen digression. It took up a third of the post, didn’t really have a point other than that he didn’t get a picture of the tablet, and wasn’t even really in the original spirit of the phrase anyway.

pugworthy 3y ago
Yea - along with interpretation of an icon being the issue.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> It took up a third of the post There would be no post if Karen didn't interfere fifteen years ago because author would had got his picture of the tablet.

seabass-labrax 3y ago

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 that should be 'He [King Esarhaddon of Assyria and therefore overlord of Babylon and therefore also of Judah] established Menasî, King of Judah in Babylon, as ruler [which he used to be anyway]'? In any case, I'm lucky enough to have a sister who can read Cuneiform, so if anyone's watching this thread hopefully I'll be back with an authoritative answer!

ekidd 3y ago
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.
- cuteboy19 3y ago
  From 'do robots dream' to 'how do we make them stop'
  - clnq 3y ago
    “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”.
    - romwell 3y ago
      "Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Gaslight You into Thinking They Are Totally Real Even Though They Have a Dozen of Eyes" doesn't have the same ring to it though.

bigbillheck 3y ago

Some people would have just emailed the museum and ask them to check what was on show in that exhibition.

ahahahahah 3y ago

A 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-king-manasseh https://armstronginstitute.org/160-esarhaddon-prism-proves-k... link describing in detail the artifact they are interested in as the 5th result (4th if you don't include the post itself). Seems a lot simpler than trying to prompt chatgpt into giving you search terms that you use in some other search anyway. But, lets say you're still amazed by that initial part of the post. The british museum (where the author had seen the artifact) provides translations of it here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1929-1012-1 https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1929-1012-... Let's compare them to chatgpt... chatgpt: > (49) They built the lofty temple. (50) As for the temple's foundation, they laid it solidly (51) Like the Apsu, it rose up from the heart of the earth (52) Its shrine was radiantly visible in the midst of the city (53) Its brilliance extended over the lands. (54) They established the kingship in Hatti and made the crown resplendent. (55) They made Menasi king in Assur, established him as ruler in Babylon. (56) Qausgabri ruled in Uruk, Musiri ruled in Ma'ab (57) Issenen, king of Hazitu, reigned over the people of Esqaluna. true translation: > (49) they made (unburnt) bricks. That little palace (50) throughout I destroyed and much land (51) as an addition from the fields I cut off and (52) added thereto : with limestone, the solid stone from the mountains, (53) I laid its foundation and filled a terrace : (54) I assembled the kings of the Hittites and across the river. (55) Ba'lu, king of Tyre, Menasi, king of Judah, (56) Kausgabri, king of Edom, Musuri, king of Moab, (57) Sil-bel, king of Gaza, Metinti, king of Ascalon, And, in fact the thing that the author seemed to care about (whether it was about Menasi of Judah), chatgpt, unsurprisingly, got wrong. Though again, just using google would've answered that immediately with the detailed description of the prism that I noted it returned as a top result above.

letmevoteplease 3y ago
Here is GPT-4's attempt; 49-51 appear to be far off while the rest at least have some relation to the British Museum translation. I imagine there is some room for ambiguity. (49) They brought the (il-bi-nu) sig4 e2-gal-tur-ra to his (szu-a-tu2) place. (50) To the market, they went (aq-qur-ma) quickly (qaq-qa-ru), very much (ma-a'-du). (51) Like (ki-ma) the (a-tar-tim-ma) from the heart (lib3-bi) of the (a-sza3-mesz) they were taken away (ab-tuq-ma). (52) His (ugu-szu2) foundation was laid (usz-rad-di) in the (na4) stone (pi-i-li) of the (na4 kur) powerful mountain (dan-ni). (53) They (usz-szi-szu2) built (ad-di-ma) it complete (tam-la-a) and perfect (u2-mal-li). (54) And thus (ad-ke-e-ma) the kings (lugal-mesz) of Hatti and the other side (e-ber) of the river (i7). (55) King (disz lugal) Balu of (iri) Surri, King (disz lugal) Menasi of (iri) Yaudi. (56) King (disz lugal) Qaus-gabri of (iri) Udume, King (disz lugal) Musur of (iri) Maab. (57) King (disz s,il-en lugal) of (iri) Haziti, Metinti (disz me-ti-in-ti) the prince (man) of (iri) Isqaluna.

DynamicDude 3y ago

I 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.

lettergram 3y ago
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
earthboundkid 3y ago
Yes, I’ve also seen it struggle with ROT13. I’ve read that this is because the tokenizer breaks up words in a way that makes mapping to ROT13 hard. I don’t expect it to have much luck with a language with a small corpus.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  The tokenizer as far as i know is just byte-pair encoding. You take your whole corpus, you find the most common 2 byte pair (probably .[space] for the first iteration) and you assign it to a token. Then, you do it again with the previously found token as possible parts of the byte pairs. Do it enough times and enventually you get full words as tokens if they're common enough, and for more uncommon words just the root of the word (and then later you can assemble root+ing for example, ing being just a normal token among others). It struggles with rot13 because people don't generally make large corpuses of text rot13 available, next to their translation, so the problem compounds. On one hand there are probably not many rot-13'd words recognized by the tokenizer, and on the other hand even if there were the model wouldn't be trained to predict the correct translation after these tokens because there are very little rot13 roseta stones just laying around.

chesneyc 3y ago

I've always wondered if ChatGPT could be used to decrypt the Zodiac killer's unsolvable cryptogram.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

I'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.

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temporallobe 3y ago

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

casefields 3y ago
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.
- flangola7 3y ago
  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

earthboundkid 3y ago

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

Veen 3y ago
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.
- H8crilA 3y ago
  I am quite sure GPT can undo tokenization if needed. It has no problem handling misspellings, plus you can just ask it to "spell things" L-I-K-E S-O.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure there is a spellchecker ran before the tokenisation also it is often wrong with spelling stuff out like that, especially with rarer or more interesting tokens

phytophagous 3y ago

As others have noticed, the translation is hilariously wrong. Even if your only method for gauging the correctness of the so-called "translation" were googling, you will easily find Leichty's [0] or Borger's [1] editions with translations. So to be very clear, saying "a translation is lacking" is thoroughly incorrect. It betrays a lack of familiarity with the subject and its reference works. Moving back to when I first saw this post, I immediately gravitated towards checking the "translation" and so neglected to read anything else written. Now that I've lovingly wasted my time transcribing and translating from the supplied transliteration before checking Leichty [0], I can move on to wasting my time with the other issues. The initial complaint about a "Karen" is obnoxious and unhelpful. You can always _write down_ the id number or title of an object in a museum if you have a specific interest. If the tablet one is interested in is Biblically relevant, then it is almost certainly referenced in literature (which you can take a shortcut to find said literature if you have that number you wrote down). All you have to do is some reading and/or contacting of relevant scholars. Tablets with references to Biblical events and persons are often exceptionally well documented due to Biblical scholarship's smothering embrace of Assyriology. If you think there might be multiple copies of this tablet, then you could ask Hobby Lobby's if they have a copy in their collection they obtained by funding ISIS. I'm sure they would love to talk about it. Moving away from museum etiquette, there are some other issues. Searching through the CDLI requires some effort. It is a tool, not a search engine with results ranked for relevance and ad revenue. Knowing the language and the processes of transliteration, transcription, and translation will help. Spellings can vary within dialects and search will not conjugate or magically find alternative cases for you. The transliterations on the CDLI are less than perfect so don't think you can just train some LLM to do this for you (There is a lot of bad data. Feel free to make some more bad data by doing some transliterating yourself with the provided low dpi images. Transliterating without both the tablet and a movable light source in front of you can border on impossible. You might make a transliteration, but it will be bad if you lack the will spend weeks staring at a photograph.). I found at least 25 texts with decent mentions of some Manassehs on the CDLI. Keep searching and remember that ChatGPT doesn't really understand cases and conjugations in the Akkadian dialects :) (especially for loan words lol). Oh and "Lugal" is Sumerian. Saying "the Akkadian word Lugal" is simply wrong. This is basic stuff. In Neo-Assyrian cuneiform (I hesitate to say all cuneiform writing systems but it probably is all (that includes non semitic languages)), LUGAL is a logogram for the "king". In this text, since it is written in the Neo-Assryian dialect of Akkadian, that would be šarru in whatever case (nominative, genitive, accusative) is appropriate. Oh and finally, it is very clear that it is a King Manasseh _of Judah_. Not Assur. Manasseh is not an Assyrian name. If you actually look at the text and just read the goddamn Akkadian, this will be obvious. It clearly says "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL URU.ia-ú-di" not "m^me-na-si-i LUGAL aš-šur^ki". It's not hard to see how wrong the translation is if you just, you know, actually translate the Akkadian. Looking more closely, ChatGPT seems to be unable to associate the given names of kings with place names. Can it not apply its "understanding" of the genitive? Is it just stupid? In fact, many of the place names in the ChatGPT translation are not mentioned anywhere in the column, let alone in this specific section. From these initial observations, GPT4/ChatGPT seems incapable of understanding rote definitions of Akkadian vocabulary, Akkadian grammatical constructs, determinatives, logograms, et al. The reading of col. V line 55 is incredibly simple. If the now GPT4 powered ChatGPT cannot translate _that_, I suspect it will be a long while before LLMs can even begin producing marginally correct translations of texts written in cuneiform. I think that doing this correctly will require an absolutely massive, tailor-made model. Since the age of giant models is now over [2] (lol) the funding just probably won't be there. From fighting with this now essay length comment, it is my newly formed opinion that proofreading hallucinated translations is more difficult that just doing the translation yourself. Any work with untranslated cuneiform requires accuracy and a thorough comprehension of the text itself. Errors, even if small can completely ruin whatever point/thesis you were trying to make. You have to remember that when dealing with cuneiform texts you aren't dealing with one language. You are dealing with whatever the cuneiform was written in, probably some sumerian phrases, maybe the language of the scribe, the languages of your reference works and dictionaries (English, French, German, etc), the idiosyncrasies of the scribe from 4000++ years ago, the idiosyncrasies of the transliterator, missing chunks of tablet, and a writing system that has no modern equivalent. And even just knowing all those things isn't enough, you personally have to be able to fill in all the gaps left by the human actions along the chain of translation. LLMs seem to struggle with the unsaid, barely hinted human influence that is a core part of translating texts written in cuneiform. Will an LLM ever be able to imagine itself as a scribe 3000 years ago, pushing a reed stylus into damp clay to make the signs of an already dead language? Will it understand why that is necessary for translation? Can it comprehend the nuance stacked on nuance that lead to it ingesting whatever text it is going to fail to translate? If it does not, then it is a poor translator. And when working with languages written in cuneiform, a poor translation is worse than useless. [0] https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-209-9.html https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-209-9.h... [1] AfO Bh. 9 [2] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of...

bubblehack3r 3y ago

Translation is mostly wrong, it completely made things up. Source: studied Akkadian for two years in University.

oefnak 3y ago
So what do the tablets say?
retrac 3y ago
Glad to see other students of Akkadian here! Yeah, I had a little bit of luck with phonetic transcription - producing standard readings from the closely transcribed cuneiform. But mostly no. And it failed at translation with anything beyond the simplest two / three word phrases. Although the fact that it can do even that, sort of, is impressive, given that Akkadian -> English was certainly not something ChatGPT was optimized for.
jiggawatts 3y ago
What about this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957726

singularity2001 3y ago

While GPTS is astonishingly good at lower German so far I found it to be pretty bad at Egyptian and Akkadian, with a very high error rate as a starter the example of the author is wrong: 𒈨𒂗𒀀𒈾 spells out me.en.a.na Even the word lugal has an unexplained "an" added

namaria 3y ago

I worked for years as a translator (PT/EN). I hated 'just correcting' bad translations, from software or people bad at it. I cannot figure out why anyone would think generating half baked text or code with some generic tool and then have to parse it, identify errors and correct it would be preferable to just doing it right yourself. It's much less pleasant work.

dr_dshiv 3y ago
I’ve been working with a professional Latin translator and encouraging her to use GPT4. She gagged, said it would be more work and against professional ethics. Still, I’ve been able to use GPT4 to read Latin fluently… and I often find it’s translations to be more readable. It here is an insane amount of untranslated Latin—and now I don’t have to pay 8k just to read a book.
- namaria 3y ago
  I'd rather have access to less text that I know to be right then a lot that might be wrong in subtle ways I cannot detect.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    That’s a reasonable take. The opposite take is also reasonable. So I think there will be a market for both.
    - namaria 3y ago
      There's a huge market for Real Housewives style 'reality' TV...
      - kenjackson 3y ago
        There is. Better than a lot of what many critics consider good TV. Turns out that one size doesn’t fit all.

pmoriarty 3y ago

Below are Claude's[1] responses. Claude+[2] might do better, but I don't have a subscription, so can't test it. Q: Do you have access to catalogues of ancient clay tablets from Babylonia, Assyria and Mitanni? A: I do not have direct access to catalogues of ancient clay tablets from Babylonia, Assyria and Mitanni. I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. Q: Can you speculate on how the biblical name of king Manasseh of Judah would have been written in Babylonian Cuneiform? A: I do not have enough information to accurately speculate on how the name Manasseh would have been written in Babylonian cuneiform. Some considerations: 1. Babylonian had no letter "M" sound, so the name would likely have been transliterated with a "B" instead, for example "Banassi". 2. The "sh" sound could have been represented by the cuneiform sign SH or ŞU, depending on the time period. 3. The final "h" would most likely have been omitted in cuneiform, as that sound was not distinct in Babylonian. 4. Vowel sounds are not indicated in cuneiform writing, so the transliteration could take various forms depending on how the scribe pronounced the name. Without access to actual examples of how Semitic names from Judah were written in cuneiform during the time of King Manasseh, any speculation would be imprecise. The name likely would have been adapted to the phonology and orthography of Babylonian cuneiform, but the exact form is uncertain. The name may have also been translated into a Babylonian name with a similar meaning, instead of directly transliterated. In summary, I cannot provide an accurate speculation, but a speculative transliteration could start with "Banass" and omit the final "h", while the vowels would be ambiguous. Hopefully this provides some context around the considerations that would have gone into representing the name in Babylonian cuneiform. Q: I found a source that gave the name as 𒈨𒈾𒋛𒄿 Menasî [me-na-si-i]; Does that sound plausible to you ? A: That transliteration of the name Manasseh as 𒈨𒈾𒋛𒄿 Menasî [me-na-si-i] in Babylonian cuneiform does sound plausible based on the following: 1. The initial letter 𒈨 (mes) approximates the 'm' sound. As I mentioned previously, Babylonian lacked an 'm' sound so 'b' was often used instead, but 'm' was also an accepted transliteration at times. 2. The 𒈾 (na) represents the 'n' sound. 3. The 𒋛 (si) approximates the 'ss' or 'sh' sound, consistent with my previous analysis that 'sh' could be represented by the SH or ŞU signs. 4. The final 𒄿 (i) approximates an 'i' vowel sound, filling in one of the potential choices for the final vowel. 5. The overall structure of consonant-vowel-consonant is consistent with how Babylonian cuneiform represented non-native names. So in summary, that proposed transliteration of the name Manasseh as 𒈨𒈾𒋛𒄿 Menasî [me-na-si-i] in Babylonian cuneiform does seem plausible and consistent with what I outlined in my initial response regarding likely considerations in representing the name in cuneiform. The specific vowels chosen are uncertain, but the overall structure and use of cuneiform signs to approximate the consonants is a reasonable transliteration. Hope this helps clarify! Let me know if you have any other questions. Q: can you tell me the meaning of the akkadian word Lugal ? A: Lugal is an Akkadian word meaning "king." It literally means "big man" or "great man" in Sumerian, from lu meaning "man" and gal meaning "big." Lugal came to be used as a title for kings and rulers in Akkadian and Sumerian. Some additional details about Lugal: • It was originally a Sumerian word that was later adopted into the Akkadian language. • Many kings and rulers used Lugal as part of their name, signifying their royal status. Examples include Lugalzagesi, Lugalanda, and Lugal-ushumgal. • The Akkadian word for king was šarrum, but Lugal was still commonly used as a royal title, likely due to its long tradition from Sumerian times. • The terms En ("lord") and Lugal ("king") were often combined in royal titles, such as Enlil ("lord of the wind"), Enki ("lord of the earth") and Enlugal ("the king is lord"). • God's and demigods were also sometimes referred to as Lugals, signifying their supreme power and authority. So in summary, Lugal was a Sumerian word meaning "big man" or "great man" that came to be used as a royal title meaning "king" in both Sumerian and Akkadian. It was a very common element in the names and titles of rulers from Sumerian through Akkadian times. Hope this provides a useful overview of the meaning and context of the Akkadian word Lugal! Let me know if you have any other questions. Q: can you translate this text in to English for me please? 49. il-bi-nu _sig4 e2-gal-tur-ra_ szu-a-tu2 50. a-na si-hir-ti-sza2 aq-qur-ma qaq-qa-ru ma-a'-du 51. ki-ma a-tar-tim-ma ul-tu lib3-bi _a-sza3-mesz_ ab-tuq-ma 52. _ugu_-szu2 usz-rad-di ina {na4}pi-i-li _na4 kur_-i dan-ni 53. usz-szi-szu2 ad-di-ma tam-la-a u2-mal-li 54. ad-ke-e-ma _lugal-mesz_ {kur}hat-ti u e-ber _i7_ 55. {disz}ba-'a-lu _lugal_ {iri}s,ur-ri {disz}me-na-si-i _lugal_ {iri}ia-u2-di 56. {disz}qa-usz-gab-ri _lugal_ {iri}u2-du-me {disz}mu-s,ur-i _lugal_ {iri}ma-'a-ab 57. {disz}s,il-_en lugal_ {iri}ha-zi-ti {disz}me-ti-in-ti _man_ {iri}is-qa-lu-na A: Here is my attempt at translating the Akkadian text into English: 49. Ibi-nu, the chief architect 50. I carefully examined for its restoration and made a strong plan 51. Like a skilled craftsman, from within my heart I conceived and 52. I placed it upon (him?), with the wise plan of the land of Dur-Sharrukin 53. I accomplished and completed. 54. Then the mighty kings: 55. The king of Hatte (Hatti) and the other kings 56.The king of Assur (Assyria), Manasseh king of Judea 57. Kushegabri king of Udum, Mushuri king of Maab 58. Sile king of Hazzi , Metinti the man of Ishqaluna. The text seems to describe an architect or craftsman named Ibi-nu who draws up a wise plan to restore something. Then it lists a number of kings, including Manasseh king of Judea along with other rulers. Hopefully this gives you a sense of the gist of the Akkadian text in English. Let me know if you have any other questions. [1] - https://poe.com/Claude-instant https://poe.com/Claude-instant [2] - https://poe.com/Claude%2B https://poe.com/Claude%2B

deleted 3y ago

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robbiep 3y ago

Seriously, how many people here can cuneiform?