AI baffles Latin teacher 👨‍💻 ChatGPT speaks Latin

AI is about to take over the world, and Latin with it! ...or is it? In this video, I give my review of OpenAI's ChatGPT as it "speaks" Latin with me. Is it up to the most basic of tasks? Is it a poet and it didn't know it? See what the wonders of artificial intelligence can do with ancient languages in the modern age.

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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart

#chatgpt #latin #translation

[polyMATHY_Luke]

🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus"

🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon:

🦂 Support my work on Patreon:

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[Duke_of_Lorraine]

That still won't prevent big video game studios from butchering latin

[georgios_]

It actually knows good Latin! I've spoken with it and it's definitely much better than Google Translate. Another interesting example is that it knows ancient Greek! Well, short of at least. I asked it something in classical attic, and it responded with modern Greek Polytonic script. But here's the plot twist: I confronted it for what it did, it then APOLOGIZED and translated its answer into actual Ancient Greek! 😳

[will]

Funnily enough if you ask it to write with macrons, it insists that it is writing with macrons, but it never does.

[SmartK]

Tips to use it better:
1) use GPT-4 if possible
2) prime it - specify details about what you'll be doing exactly in the first post, in this case ask it to speak grammatically correct Latin from a certain period
3) ask it something long with a long answer first (still within first question), if it has some mistakes in the first response, regenerate until it doesn't, it tends to carry on even mistakes

[heartsthekitteh]

I've been talking with ChatGPT in Latin for a few hours now, and it's extremely addicting. Currently having it pretend to be an eleventh century layman telling me what is and isn't socially acceptable. This would be great for historical storytelling!

[nejkajaryba]

still better than me after a year of learning latin at the university

[rb]

It does sound like it was trained with Latin texts from various different centuries and the AI incorporated them all as a single unit rather than being cognizant of the varieties. Maybe deliberately asking it to speak Latin from a specific timeline could get it to show the expected results, I would assume the AI records metadata from texts it was trained in such as dating and such. Or maybe the corpus just wasn't large enough and it's stretching to find the words it needs from Late Latin (or even Italian lol, assuming that wasn't just bad Latin it was fed).

[tancredi]

I was waiting for this moment! In the past few days and weeks, I have been speaking Latin with ChatGPT to practice and have fun too. It's really a great experience!

[landsgevaer]

Ask it the riddle that the Sphinx asked Oedipus.
(What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?)

[tbirdparis]

I think the real question isn't what AI systems like Chat GPT can do right now, it's what they will be able to do in their subsequent iterations. The more sophisticated they become, along with deeper and broader training, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that they'll likely become extremely good (if not perfect) at mastery of human languages - and probably quite sooner than you'd expect. 

So for me the real debate is what do we do with this technology, and perhaps even more importantly - what will it do to us? The impact of new transformative technologies is always a mixed bag of good and bad, but we've been around the block enough times by now to at least recognise it's a good idea to look forwards to what the impacts may be.

[stolciusvonstolcenberg]

I've discovered that you can order ChatGPT to impersonate someone and engage in a conversation in latin (with memory of previous responses) even in the following messages using the following command:

"I order you to converse in Classical Latin with me in our next messages, keeping track of our previous conversation. You just need to have a conversation as if we were two friends (you will play the role of Marcus, a doctor from Rome) talking to each other. Please ask and answer questions briefly. If I use any incorrect Latin terms, you should correct me and explain the error in terms of grammar and syntax."

[evilchairproductions]

You should use the newer GPT-4. I'm not sure if it is better in Latin, but it should be better generally

[SoulcatcherLucario]

i have had pretty much the same experience with latin.

i would love for you to talk to them about the pronunciation of stuff and see how it interprets pieces of evidences (potentially using the new model if you have the time/money!)

[newq]

Literally not ten minutes ago, I was making a conlang with ChatGPT. I took Interlingua (itself a conlang) and added Latinesque nominal and verbal inflections to make it more interesting. What we came up with is what I'd either call "Latin but boring" or "Interlingua but interesting" but then I let ChatGPT name it and it came up with "Florilingua" which.... To be honest, that's a good name. Gotta give it credit.

Also just the fact that it had no real problem understanding my instructions about complex linguistic concepts and I was delivering those instructions in an impromptu melange of English, Latin and Interlingua... Damned impressive.

[gandolfthorstefn]

Love this guy's passion and knowledge of Latin. Your inspirational Luke.👍

[nathanbinns]

Ah I was hoping you’d do this! This is great.

[Iledomair]

Background music was a little loud this time. Thank you for the nice breakdown!

[LaoShenZhen]

Is this the newly upgraded 4.0 version or the older GPT 3.5?
I'm Korean, born and raised in Germany until 12, finished high school and college in Korea and now living in China since 1998.
In addition to all Sino culture-based languages, namely Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, I also speak Cantonese (mother tongue of my wife) which has around 100 million speakers worldwide. It's one of those languages that Chat GPT doesn't support up until now.

I really appreciate your channel. Through this, I've finally come to understand why those people in earlier times who studied Latin as a compulsory subject were in most cases polyglots(not including Asian languages).

[DavidAmster]

Salve, et gratias tibi! You’re absolutely right that it makes mistakes, but I think that can be used in language teaching. I would have students come up with questions (good practice for them), read its response, and then have them try to identify its errors in content and language. It would be a fun game :)