4 ms·

I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can OCR is VERY good

BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can I do. > OCR is VERY good Uh, my experience is extremely different.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Your experience is obsolete.
  - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
    Oh, ok then.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      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.
      - bigstrat2003 2y ago
        Not being rude was also an option, one you chose not to take for some reason. Seriously, all it would've taken was for you to say something like "there have been a lot of advancements so it's probably different than you remember". This conversation would've gone much smoother for you if you had. And BugsJustFindMe can't downvote you, because it was a reply to him. So don't bite his head off over it. You got downvoted because you were a jerk, plain and simple.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        Not being rude was also an option Refraining from reflexively pooh-poohing AI with uninformed and/or out-of-date opinions is also an option, but not one often exercised on HN. It gets old not being able to carry on a discussion without squinting at grayed-out text, simply because someone pointed out that humans aren't robots and should no longer have to emulate them.
      - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
        Can you feed these to ChatGPT and tell me what it says they say? https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs 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.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        Eh, I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting, not translating medieval script written in a dead language. It seems reasonable to expect specialized models to be used for this type of work. Still, here's the first one, via Gemini 2.0 experimental: https://i.imgur.com/HtnwfHp.png 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 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 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 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.
        BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
        > Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least Yes! But that's the easy part. :) > I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting Yeah, see, I think that's a very narrow expectation. Archive paleography is substantially broader than that. I'm not saying that the tools are useless, but they're often still not better than humans directing focused care and attention. > o1-pro, on the other hand, completely shat the bed The result is absolutely hilarious though! So kudos to the model for making me laugh at least. > 4o did pretty well It is indeed pretty good and very impressive as a technological feat. The big problems I guess are: 1) Pretty good isn't necessarily good enough. 2) If one machine gets it right and one machine gets it wrong, can a machine reconcile them? Or must we again recruit humans? 3) If a machine seems to get a lot right but also clearly makes important factual errors in ways where a human looks and says "how could you possibly get this part wrong, of all things?" (like the year), how much do we trust and rely on it?
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.
  - demosthanos 2y ago
    The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed: > 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. They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive. It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.
    - tedunangst 2y ago
      Can someone please post a sample of one of these images that can only be read by a human for us naive OCR believers to see?
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        To be fair there was a similar discussion a few days ago in which an SME remained unconvinced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391 I don't necessarily agree with her conclusion because she wasn't participating directly in the thread and wasn't completely responsive to some of the points raised, but still, it appears that there are a few instances of difficult-to-read handwriting where OCR is still coming in second to skilled human interpretation.
        jncfhnb 2y ago
        That’s comprehension of English not reading characters
AdieuToLogic 2y ago
> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can Considering the people involved are experts in their field, are certainly aware of OCR capabilities, and have publicized a need thusly: ... the National Archives is looking for volunteers who can help transcribe and organize its many handwritten records ... Perhaps "random humans" can perform tasks which could reshape your belief: > OCR is VERY good
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here.
  - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
    > There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here. Asserting an ulterior motive without supporting proof is to engage in conspiracy theories. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.[0] 0 - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      It doesn't look like a cigar (very tricky documents) though. Hence the skepticism.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      The alternative is me saying that appealing to their “expertise” is an appeal to authority fallacy that flies in the face of general evidence that modern OCR is far better than humans at character recognition. Especially random non specialized humans.
      - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
        Fair point.
ozbonus 2y ago
I've been trying every state of the art OCR solution on my students' handwritten essays for fifteen years and have yet to find anything even close to acceptable.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  What methods have you tried?
- wriggler 2y ago
  I'm the founder of handwritingocr.com - have you checked out our free trial? We have loads of educators using our service for exactly this, and they seem quite happy with it.
jahewson 2y ago
Actually I think in 2025 you are correct, we just haven’t got the best tech into the OCR software that’s out there in the real world. I just pasted the letter from the article into ChatGPT (4o) and asked “what does this old letter say?” The response: —- The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America. The said James Lambert on this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the State of Indiana and at the November Term of said Court (1841), it being a court of record established by the laws of Indiana and made oath that: On the 25th day of March 1842 he will be eighty-five years old; that he was born in the State of Maryland; that he is now a resident of said county and has been for the 27 years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania… —-

> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can I do. > OCR is VERY good Uh, my experience is extremely different.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Your experience is obsolete.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
  Oh, ok then.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    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.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Not being rude was also an option, one you chose not to take for some reason. Seriously, all it would've taken was for you to say something like "there have been a lot of advancements so it's probably different than you remember". This conversation would've gone much smoother for you if you had. And BugsJustFindMe can't downvote you, because it was a reply to him. So don't bite his head off over it. You got downvoted because you were a jerk, plain and simple.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Not being rude was also an option Refraining from reflexively pooh-poohing AI with uninformed and/or out-of-date opinions is also an option, but not one often exercised on HN. It gets old not being able to carry on a discussion without squinting at grayed-out text, simply because someone pointed out that humans aren't robots and should no longer have to emulate them.
    - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
      Can you feed these to ChatGPT and tell me what it says they say? https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs 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.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        Eh, I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting, not translating medieval script written in a dead language. It seems reasonable to expect specialized models to be used for this type of work. Still, here's the first one, via Gemini 2.0 experimental: https://i.imgur.com/HtnwfHp.png 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 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 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 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.
        BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
        > Did it correctly identify the language as Old French, at least Yes! But that's the easy part. :) > I was talking about OCR'ing modern English cursive handwriting Yeah, see, I think that's a very narrow expectation. Archive paleography is substantially broader than that. I'm not saying that the tools are useless, but they're often still not better than humans directing focused care and attention. > o1-pro, on the other hand, completely shat the bed The result is absolutely hilarious though! So kudos to the model for making me laugh at least. > 4o did pretty well It is indeed pretty good and very impressive as a technological feat. The big problems I guess are: 1) Pretty good isn't necessarily good enough. 2) If one machine gets it right and one machine gets it wrong, can a machine reconcile them? Or must we again recruit humans? 3) If a machine seems to get a lot right but also clearly makes important factual errors in ways where a human looks and says "how could you possibly get this part wrong, of all things?" (like the year), how much do we trust and rely on it?
jncfhnb 2y ago
I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.
- demosthanos 2y ago
  The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed: > 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. They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive. It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.
  - tedunangst 2y ago
    Can someone please post a sample of one of these images that can only be read by a human for us naive OCR believers to see?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      To be fair there was a similar discussion a few days ago in which an SME remained unconvinced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391 I don't necessarily agree with her conclusion because she wasn't participating directly in the thread and wasn't completely responsive to some of the points raised, but still, it appears that there are a few instances of difficult-to-read handwriting where OCR is still coming in second to skilled human interpretation.
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        That’s comprehension of English not reading characters

AdieuToLogic 2y ago

> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can Considering the people involved are experts in their field, are certainly aware of OCR capabilities, and have publicized a need thusly: ... the National Archives is looking for volunteers who can help transcribe and organize its many handwritten records ... Perhaps "random humans" can perform tasks which could reshape your belief: > OCR is VERY good

jncfhnb 2y ago
There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here.
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  > There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here. Asserting an ulterior motive without supporting proof is to engage in conspiracy theories. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.[0] 0 - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    It doesn't look like a cigar (very tricky documents) though. Hence the skepticism.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    The alternative is me saying that appealing to their “expertise” is an appeal to authority fallacy that flies in the face of general evidence that modern OCR is far better than humans at character recognition. Especially random non specialized humans.
    - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
      Fair point.

ozbonus 2y ago

I've been trying every state of the art OCR solution on my students' handwritten essays for fifteen years and have yet to find anything even close to acceptable.

jncfhnb 2y ago
What methods have you tried?
wriggler 2y ago
I'm the founder of handwritingocr.com - have you checked out our free trial? We have loads of educators using our service for exactly this, and they seem quite happy with it.

jahewson 2y ago

Actually I think in 2025 you are correct, we just haven’t got the best tech into the OCR software that’s out there in the real world. I just pasted the letter from the article into ChatGPT (4o) and asked “what does this old letter say?” The response: —- The following is the declaration of James Lambert, a soldier of the Revolutionary War in North America. The said James Lambert on this day personally appeared in the Probate Court of the County of Dearborn in the State of Indiana and at the November Term of said Court (1841), it being a court of record established by the laws of Indiana and made oath that: On the 25th day of March 1842 he will be eighty-five years old; that he was born in the State of Maryland; that he is now a resident of said county and has been for the 27 years last past; that he has lived in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania… —-