4 ms·

While I haven't tried OpenAI for OCR, I've put my small scale OCR work through both Claude and Mistral OCR. Claude is absolutely better - even in OCR work I did

While I haven't tried OpenAI for OCR, I've put my small scale OCR work through both Claude and Mistral OCR. Claude is absolutely better - even in OCR work I did last week and compared with Mistral OCR 4.0. Mistral's one advantage is that Anthropic now flags OCR, because they don't allow anything that could be considered "reproduction", even of work for which you own the copyright. So my new workflow is Mistral OCR for the actual OCR, followed by a proofreading pass by Claude (which is allowed). Claude is obviously more expensive, but it caught entirely hallucinated sentences created by Mistral OCR 4.0, so I was glad for the backup check.

Oras 2mo ago
Same company that OCRed millions of books, the irony. I feel Anthropic is destroying itself with all these restriction. They got away because their models were the best for coding, but that is not an advantage anymore as OpenAI and other open source are already better.
- usef- 2mo ago
  They were criticised/sued early on when people could reproduce copyright things. I dont think in this case it's something they'd prefer to do?
  - SyneRyder 2mo ago
    Yep, my understanding is that many guardrails like this are actually the result of government legislation (eg the Fable bans) or terms of settling copyright lawsuits over reproducing copyrighted text and lyrics. I mentioned it in a sibling reply, but here's Anthropic's support document about not using Claude to reproduce content verbatim that already exists, regardless of copyright. https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-receiving-an-output-blocked-by-content-filtering-policy-error https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- sscaryterry 2mo ago
  It is why they're pushing for regulatory capture. Let us do the bad stuff, make the money, then we'll regulate everybody else out of the market.
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  Claude refuses to translate lyrics of songs even if it's just for your own understanding. ChatGPT allows it. Also, Suno is so restrictive that it won't make songs of public domain 19th century poems because someone else already made a song and the lyrics are in their song database. And it won't do covers of your own uploaded humming of a novel melody because it matches "humming in an empty room" to some song fingerprint in the database. They are all trying to avoid these lawsuits by being ridiculously overly cautious. "Your honor, look how much we went above and beyond, even when it made the product worse for legitimate use cases"
jassyr 2mo ago
>Anthropic now flags OCR I haven't seen any difference in my ocr workflows, what do you mean by this?
- tkgally 2mo ago
  Not the person you’re responding to, but I’ve had Claude refuse to OCR pages from in-copyright books. I was sometimes (but not always) able to get around that by changing models, by telling it that I was doing the text conversion only for personal use, or by first telling it to use Tesseract or another OCR engine to do the initial pass and then having a Claude subagent proofread and clean up the OCR output. I’ve also had it refuse to OCR public-domain books that included content that it didn’t like, such as references to prostitution in 19th-century books about Japan. I had one session where Claude refused to continue after it hit some kind of guiderail restriction. I couldn’t see what the trigger was, so I started a new session, gave Claude the link to the previous session, and asked it to diagnose the problem. This new Claude said it couldn’t view the exact guardrail issue, but it did suggest a workaround that turned out to be effective.
  - laichzeit0 2mo ago
    Yeah I do something similar and Claude (well OpenAI too) just refuses to transcribe anything related to slavery and pederasty in Ancient Greece.
    - ComputerPerson 2mo ago
      Are you familiar with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae? It's a project that may meet your needs. Paywalled, unfortunately, but I assume it would be a one-time expense.
  - discordance 2mo ago
    This is too funny considering they did that themselves. I’m pretty tired of these companies deciding what we can and can’t do while they act with impunity.
  - fsloth 2mo ago
dylan604 2mo ago
> Claude is obviously more expensive, but it caught entirely hallucinated sentences created by Mistral OCR 4.0, so I was glad for the backup check. What does this entail? What does Claude do to decide that the text it was provided was hallucinated? Are you telling Claude that the source was OCR'd by another LLM?
- mattnewton 2mo ago
  I assume they pass the image alongside the text to redo/recheck the work. Yes this is silly, but is apparently required to get around refusals.
- SyneRyder 2mo ago
  I'm basically doing the OCR twice, except in the Claude proofreading pass, it is not being asked to transcribe the document to a Markdown file. I'm pointing it to the same image input files, and to the Mistral OCR transcript Markdown file (it knows it's a Mistral OCR output), and ask Claude to check that the text is correct and point out the errors - and then make the necessary edits. I can't speak for Mistral OCR 4.1, but the hallucinations in 4.0 were so egregious (just completely making up new sentences in the middle of a page) that I knew I can't trust Mistral OCR on its own.
  - adrianN 2mo ago
    How bad is the first OCR pass allowed to be to still count as proofreading? Can you let Claude compare the images with /dev/random and make the necessary edits to correct differences?
    - SyneRyder 2mo ago
      Hmm, that's an interesting idea. But it's the classifier that is triggering, and it triggers specifically on Claude's output. So I think the /dev/random case wouldn't work, because that gets Claude into the state of just reproducing the entire text from the original again. It doesn't always get flagged. Single pages are almost always okay. Running a program that sequentially runs single pages through the API is often not okay - I wrote a program in the early 4.x days before the rule came in, that's how I hit it first. But I've also had entire articles go through just fine recently in a Claude Code session (I'd forgotten about Anthropic's rules!), and then others where I get classifier errors by page 4. The Mistral OCR errors were small in size. Single sentences, formatting errors, paragraphs with newlines. So this was a genuine proofreading job with small changes. For the most part Mistral is actually good, but I can't have it just inventing sentences in the middle of a document. That's where the Claude proofreading pass was most helpful.
runtime_lens 2mo ago
[flagged]

Oras 2mo ago

Same company that OCRed millions of books, the irony. I feel Anthropic is destroying itself with all these restriction. They got away because their models were the best for coding, but that is not an advantage anymore as OpenAI and other open source are already better.

usef- 2mo ago
They were criticised/sued early on when people could reproduce copyright things. I dont think in this case it's something they'd prefer to do?
- SyneRyder 2mo ago
  Yep, my understanding is that many guardrails like this are actually the result of government legislation (eg the Fable bans) or terms of settling copyright lawsuits over reproducing copyrighted text and lyrics. I mentioned it in a sibling reply, but here's Anthropic's support document about not using Claude to reproduce content verbatim that already exists, regardless of copyright. https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-receiving-an-output-blocked-by-content-filtering-policy-error https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
sscaryterry 2mo ago
It is why they're pushing for regulatory capture. Let us do the bad stuff, make the money, then we'll regulate everybody else out of the market.
bonoboTP 2mo ago
Claude refuses to translate lyrics of songs even if it's just for your own understanding. ChatGPT allows it. Also, Suno is so restrictive that it won't make songs of public domain 19th century poems because someone else already made a song and the lyrics are in their song database. And it won't do covers of your own uploaded humming of a novel melody because it matches "humming in an empty room" to some song fingerprint in the database. They are all trying to avoid these lawsuits by being ridiculously overly cautious. "Your honor, look how much we went above and beyond, even when it made the product worse for legitimate use cases"

jassyr 2mo ago

>Anthropic now flags OCR I haven't seen any difference in my ocr workflows, what do you mean by this?

tkgally 2mo ago
Not the person you’re responding to, but I’ve had Claude refuse to OCR pages from in-copyright books. I was sometimes (but not always) able to get around that by changing models, by telling it that I was doing the text conversion only for personal use, or by first telling it to use Tesseract or another OCR engine to do the initial pass and then having a Claude subagent proofread and clean up the OCR output. I’ve also had it refuse to OCR public-domain books that included content that it didn’t like, such as references to prostitution in 19th-century books about Japan. I had one session where Claude refused to continue after it hit some kind of guiderail restriction. I couldn’t see what the trigger was, so I started a new session, gave Claude the link to the previous session, and asked it to diagnose the problem. This new Claude said it couldn’t view the exact guardrail issue, but it did suggest a workaround that turned out to be effective.
- laichzeit0 2mo ago
  Yeah I do something similar and Claude (well OpenAI too) just refuses to transcribe anything related to slavery and pederasty in Ancient Greece.
  - ComputerPerson 2mo ago
    Are you familiar with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae? It's a project that may meet your needs. Paywalled, unfortunately, but I assume it would be a one-time expense.
- discordance 2mo ago
  This is too funny considering they did that themselves. I’m pretty tired of these companies deciding what we can and can’t do while they act with impunity.
- fsloth 2mo ago

dylan604 2mo ago

> Claude is obviously more expensive, but it caught entirely hallucinated sentences created by Mistral OCR 4.0, so I was glad for the backup check. What does this entail? What does Claude do to decide that the text it was provided was hallucinated? Are you telling Claude that the source was OCR'd by another LLM?

mattnewton 2mo ago
I assume they pass the image alongside the text to redo/recheck the work. Yes this is silly, but is apparently required to get around refusals.
SyneRyder 2mo ago
I'm basically doing the OCR twice, except in the Claude proofreading pass, it is not being asked to transcribe the document to a Markdown file. I'm pointing it to the same image input files, and to the Mistral OCR transcript Markdown file (it knows it's a Mistral OCR output), and ask Claude to check that the text is correct and point out the errors - and then make the necessary edits. I can't speak for Mistral OCR 4.1, but the hallucinations in 4.0 were so egregious (just completely making up new sentences in the middle of a page) that I knew I can't trust Mistral OCR on its own.
- adrianN 2mo ago
  How bad is the first OCR pass allowed to be to still count as proofreading? Can you let Claude compare the images with /dev/random and make the necessary edits to correct differences?
  - SyneRyder 2mo ago
    Hmm, that's an interesting idea. But it's the classifier that is triggering, and it triggers specifically on Claude's output. So I think the /dev/random case wouldn't work, because that gets Claude into the state of just reproducing the entire text from the original again. It doesn't always get flagged. Single pages are almost always okay. Running a program that sequentially runs single pages through the API is often not okay - I wrote a program in the early 4.x days before the rule came in, that's how I hit it first. But I've also had entire articles go through just fine recently in a Claude Code session (I'd forgotten about Anthropic's rules!), and then others where I get classifier errors by page 4. The Mistral OCR errors were small in size. Single sentences, formatting errors, paragraphs with newlines. So this was a genuine proofreading job with small changes. For the most part Mistral is actually good, but I can't have it just inventing sentences in the middle of a document. That's where the Claude proofreading pass was most helpful.

runtime_lens 2mo ago

[flagged]