When an AI Makes a Language (A Layperson's Experience)

ChatGPT voiced by @Annatomyy

"Zero predicate" should have been "zero copula" - I was being silly.
I'm not an AI expert or programmer and don't know how to prompt this thing properly. This is a layperson's experience of the AI, and is more for entertainment than anything else.

Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Music by me.

#chatgpt #linguistics #conlang

[paulwesley]

the web version you were using, forms text based only on the last 4000 tokens. That's why it forgot things so fast. Using the API, you can use a model with 32k token "memory".

[roseashkiiii]

As a native adal speaker i have to say you speak beautifly without an accent.

[waspsandwich]

I mean, sunsets are often beautiful and saying "language is the language" could be using a strange form of reduplication to show importance.

[grimm]

I find it pretty cool how it came up with the idea that the world for "sunset" and "beautiful" would be the same. Made me hopeful that this experiment was going somewhere with the vocab 😂

[EmmaMaySeven]

I wonder if, having made up the name "Adali" wholecloth, ChatGPT became confused when asked to say something "in Adali" because that language doesn't exist. Desperately seeking some fingerhold it latched onto the Adali sultanate and guessed you want it to speak Arabic.

[alexshi]

A good way to make ChatGPT say things you want is to seem to be making it pretend to be someone else. Maybe saying something like "Pretend you are a fiction writer who has created a conlang. Describe the conlang and be sure to include ..." will get you a more "authentic" sounding result.

[tyronew]

Key prompt engineering tip: Write your prompts specifying every little detail you want in its behaviour. Even seemingly obvious stuff, like "be internally consistent", "be accurate", "think of possibility x or y" are really good ways to make it a lot better. Or setting things up like "You're a linguist passionate about making interesting conlangs, write (an outline/a specific part of the conlang)". This limits the probability space of the LLM to behaviours you would prefer.

[ValkyRiver]

Wait… was Adal an Arabic dialect (with English influence) all along?

[Samuel-p]

The genius behind the language changing this much is, that only a computer is able to understand it. Us human will never be able to learn it fast enough.

[yuvalne]

ChatGPT switching to a different language in the middle is actually something I encountered. It claims to be fluent in toki pona, but switches to Esperanto halfway through.

[rrobucksthehuman]

I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason Chat-GPT became such a weeaboo for Arabic was that it was thinking of the actual Sultanate of Adal located in modern day Somalia, and thereby thought that you were trying to invent a language for the people of Adal, which just so happens to be parked right next to Yemen, an Arabic speaking nation.

[Remls]

This was hilarious
10:55 I lost it when it straight up started speaking Arabic instead lmao

[ganapatikamesh]

LOL. So this reminded me of way back in 1995 when a bunch of kids and teens in my neighborhood decided to create our own society which included creating our own language. However, the very first thing we did was to give ourselves names and then translate the names. Now you’d think we’d all sit in a room together to do this, but we did not do that. Instead about four of us first got together and came up with names. Our idea was that names would be sentences so there’d be an object and an adjective to describe the object. That’s be like our first names, common names, etc, and then we’d have a type of phrase afterwards putting the described object into a setting and that setting would be like surnames. So we came up with one for each of us (with the everyone choosing for each person rather than individuals choosing themselves) and then came up with words based on a set of sounds we wanted in the language. So, for example, the word for wolf was konta. “Well this is easy” we thought. Uhhhh…turns out some of the others had also been meeting in their own separate groups of four or five and were coming with words, too. So when we did finally all meet for the first time on the 23rd day of May in 1995 we had to sort some language rules out. And we thought we did a really good job and patted ourselves on the back. There were only about 15 of us when starting. By that autumn there were now 25 of us and we were working in different groupings of what we called communities. Keep in my mind we’re also setting up government, monetary system, religion, creating a history (we opted to connect it to some previous games and create a mythical history from that) and more at the same time! By early 1996, three of us got the idea to put together a dictionary for our language which meant visiting all the communities. By then we now had over 50 members involved! You get over 50 different people working in around two dozen groups called communities on a language who don’t regularly meet up and you end up with a lot of……inconsistencies! LOL By the time we finished getting the first edition of the dictionary done we had had to create new letters for the alphabet, come up with new ways to transcribe everything using the Latin alphabet, had words borrowed from other languages that were just borrowed without their meaning (because others in communities were working on their own dictionaries sometimes just going in alphabetical order). We had a language that had articles but in some cases weren’t used or were used but were a different word that when not an article meant something else entirely (the word tí meant time, but when put in front of the word for forest, jawat, it became the definite article instead of what we thought was supposed to be the definite article aé). There were rules and then exceptions to the rules and then exceptions to the exceptions. There was polite forms of words that didn’t have any connection to the base word (aya meant you, ycha meant you, at meant you, atah meant you….which one do you use, depends on how formal you want to be!). There were more than one word for the exact same thing, there were words that required a dictionary level explanation of because it was a simple translation. There were words with gender and words without gender, there were verb forms that….well seriously if you saw L’ how would you pronounce that? Apparently according to the community that wrote it, it’s pronounced like el and that community did that a lot! The word for dance they came up with was c’an…it’s pronounced see-ah-n as in any letter with a ‘ next to it gets pronounced by its English name! Not kidding the word for run was supposed to be éyèt, but they spelled it é’yèt [the mark above indicates vowel sounds like é as in see while è as in bed so the ‘ os redundant]. The word for computer was ajèhatajiki (the i in this case make the é sound but that community used i for it instead of é so we now had vowels a, à, á, é, è, i, í, ì, o, ú, ú, etc). The word is a compound: ajèha means complicate and tajiki means machine, so a computer was a complicated machine. 😆 We kept with it until early 2006 when the youngest amongst us originals had graduated high school and went off to college while the oldest amongst us were busy raising children, getting married, etc. And while some of us are still friends with each other and occasionally talk about the entire experiment, it’s definitely just a fun part of our past. But seeing the craziness that you had with ChatGPT reminded me of the time when trying to put the dictionary together and even afterwards trying to keep it up and trying to get everyone to work on simplifying and making it more consistent.

Great video! Thanks for making and sharing it!!

FYI: we had a website on Geocities in the early 2000s when we had over 100 members both online and in person. If you Google “Illustrious Royal Nation of Ejah” you’ll find the archived site. Last I checked the dictionary is still on the site (but be aware that none of the diacritic marks are on it….in order to help teach the language we opted to have students apply the marks while going through the words together; which means that in some cases I look at it and am not certain of the pronunciation…especially if it was a word not used often).

[AgmaSchwa]

Glad we had equally cursed experiences with ChatGPT, lol.

[TalysAlankil]

"like a child trying to finish their last minute homework" yes that's all chatgpt can do. it just creates text that kinda sounds related to the topic, and hopes you'll be fooled.

[NeP]

Note: Chat GPT has a hard time understanding phonology because it only perceives the world through text. It can't even see the spelling of words most of the time. The wonders of the token system.

[-Motive-]

I told ChatGPT: "Make a conlang yourself." and it responded with:

"Creating a conlang (constructed language) can be a fascinating endeavor. Here's an example of a conlang called "Lumina" that you can use as a starting point:

Phonetics and Phonology:

Lumina consists of 26 letters, similar to the English alphabet.
The consonant sounds are relatively familiar, but the vowel system is simplified, including only five vowel sounds: a, e, i, o, u.
The language has a syllable structure of (C)(C)V(C), allowing for single or double consonants before a vowel and a single consonant after a vowel.
Grammar:

Nouns:
Nouns are not inflected for case, but they can be modified by preceding adjectives.
Plural nouns are formed by adding the suffix "-en" at the end.
There are no gender distinctions in nouns.
Verbs:
Verbs in Lumina do not conjugate based on tense, but they can be modified using time adverbs or contextual cues.
Verbs are conjugated for person and number, indicating the subject of the sentence.
Infinitives end with the suffix "-a."
Word Order:
The basic word order in Lumina is subject-verb-object (SVO), but word order can be rearranged for emphasis or stylistic purposes.
Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify.
Vocabulary:

Building a vocabulary for Lumina involves creating words that are distinct yet easily pronounceable. You can start with basic concepts and gradually expand the lexicon as needed.
Examples:

Greetings:
Hello: Salut
Goodbye: Adieu
How are you?: Kume ilu?
I'm fine: Kuili.
Basic Phrases:
Thank you: Grazia
Please: Silvuplu
Excuse me: Skuzel
Sorry: Pardona
Numbers:
One: Unu
Two: Du
Three: Tri
Ten: Deca
Remember, this is just a basic outline to get you started. Feel free to expand and develop the language further, creating more vocabulary, rules, and exceptions as you see fit. Conlang creation is a highly creative process, and you can adapt Lumina or create an entirely new conlang with your own rules and unique features. Enjoy exploring the world of constructed languages!"

[Akaykimuy]

love how your Swedish-ness comes out so clearly when you pronounce [e] and [o]

[rainbsnd]

I use the Bing AI to help me with phonological evolution and ideas for creating new words. It works pretty well, you just need to always check the sources (which are always provided by the AI after any message).

[ryuko]

My favourite thing is how I immediately found the Arabic influence minutes before you mentioned it, *sifā* sounds like a cognate of Semitic *sayf and Greek xiphos, and riye "man" especially how you pronounced it like [ɹijje] reminded me of Urban Gulf Arabic /rajjaːl/.