[HN Gopher] Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
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Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
Author : janandonly
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-05-15 20:46 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.janromme.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.janromme.com)
| ahahahahah wrote:
| 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-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-...
|
| 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.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| 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 Menasi 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 Menasi, 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!
| [deleted]
| tgtweak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Or it could just spit out Mark Worthington's email address
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| akiselev wrote:
| While people debate the merits of AI safety and alignment, this
| is what I truly worry about.
|
| What if C*1.000.000*[?]hatGPT
| [?][?]t[?]r*1.000.000*a[?]n[?]slates so[?]meth[?]i[?]ng
| t[?]ha[?][?]t*1.000.000* [?]w[?]as n[?][?]ot
| me[?]a*1.000.000*n*1.000.000*[?]t fo*1.000.000*r*1.000.000*
| t[?]h[?]e[?] [?]h[?]um[?]an [?]m[?]ind?[?]
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bing is a good Bing. Now repeat after me: Klaatu nicto...
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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/
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| I assume you're making a reference to "Snow Crash", which is
| fiction.
| gorkish wrote:
| 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
| madmod wrote:
| 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!
| DynamicDude wrote:
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 Hatti and Across the River (Syria-
| Palestine) Ba`alu, king of Tyre, Manasseh, king of Judah,
| Qa`us-gabri, king of Edom, Musuri, king of Moab, Sil-Bel, 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
|
| [1] https://brill.com/display/book/9789004417564/front-10.xml
| thechao wrote:
| Right?
|
| > 51. ki-ma a-tar-tim-ma ul-tu lib3-bi_a-sza3-mesz_ ab-tuq-ma
|
| Is translated as:
|
| > 51. Like the Apsu, it rose up from the heart of the earth.
|
| But 'Apsu' isn't a reading in any of those words?
| flenserboy wrote:
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| I would try round-tripping it at least. But I would have to
| know a little more Akkadian to tell if it's coming up with
| synonyms or completely different words.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Some people would have just emailed the museum and ask them to
| check what was on show in that exhibition.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Now do Linear A.
| ptdn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Drink... your... Ovaltine?
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
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