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Comment by seabass-labrax | Hacker News Reader

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 Menasî 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 Menasî, 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!

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I can confirm that GPT 4 fails pretty badly on Middle Egyptian texts that are outside of its training set, using both MdC encoding and transliteration.

I get translations which have at most a word or two in common with the original text. Almost pure hallucination.

From 'do robots dream' to 'how do we make them stop'

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is a must-read for fans of Blade Runner and the cyberpunk genre.

Also, it’s interesting that in 2023, we can reasonably definitively answer that question for any definition of “dream”.

"Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Gaslight You into Thinking They Are Totally Real Even Though They Have a Dozen of Eyes" doesn't have the same ring to it though.

We can conclude that the question posited by the book is too abstract to answer. Until a book with a better question is written, the case is closed. :)

I might be one of the few people who didn’t like this book. Philip K Dick (the author) manages to come up with some of the most incredible premises. And then somehow the plot meanders into some boring, meaningless corner that left me mystified. How could the person who thought of this premise also have written this plot?

It’s not just Androids. In another book he comes up with this fascinating idea of an alternate history where Japan and Germany won WWII. And then it turns out astrology is real and everyone is obsessing over it. Just why?

I’m sure everyone will say actually astrology is fascinating, or you need to look past that to get the real meaning of the book. But I prefer the books that don’t meander into meaningless dead ends. There are plenty of them out there.

Yet others may say Dick was enormously influential and inspired many other brilliant authors. Ok, I’ll read those authors then.

Overall I’d rate the books I’ve read by Dick as 2 stars. And only because the premises are so fantastic.

I do not know if this will make you change your opinion, but at least it will "inform" it a bit better: "The Man in the High Castle" (i.e. the one with the alternate WWII ending) was allegedly "plotted" by using the I-Ching. Basically before every chapter/scene Dick would cast the I-Ching[1] and use the response to decide "what happens now?".

Dick was always obsessed with a few core themes ("what is real?", "what is human?") plus a ton of personal and psychological issues. It was always erratic in his production, and while I like his works, I would generally agree that the way he developed his own premises could often be "disappointing" at least in the case of novels.

Short stories are usually much better, IMHO.

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[1] here is my take on it, if you want to know a bit more about I-Ching: https://pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html

That makes a lot of sense. The characters following astrology would explain why all their decisions felt so disconnected and weird.

Did you read something about him as a person? He was a profoundly weird person (one example from wiki: "Dick alleged that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect"), and that weirdness seeped into his novels. I think you could try one of his semi-autobiographical novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth) to see where this weirdness in the more known novels comes from.

You say weirdness, I say best drugs available to man in impressive quantities. A Scanner Darkly and Ubik are mind bending

I heartily recommend "Divine Invasions" by Sutin (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22587.Divine_Invasions) to anyone who would like to know more about Dick's life and personal issues, and the way these influenced his works.

> I might be one of the few people who didn’t like this book.

Though I'm a huge fan of PKD, I didn't like DADOES either, and consider it to be one of his minor works. The movie was far better.

His top-tier works, in my view, are:

- Ubik

- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

- Martian Timeslip

> how do we make them stop

The same way we do with humans: reflection, critical thinking.

(Although, disrobing the "Cato the censor" robes, yes I loved this image.)

(Although II, the original concept of "androids dreaming of electric sheep" is more related to the PKD theme of the human problem in terms of emotion, the deontic call for empathy, the human property of the inner trouble within a mechanistic perspective. So, as if it could be rephrased as "is angst inherent in humanity [as a quality]" and "is empathy the solution". Edit: or "Is humanity a goal, does it imply care, and do you reach it with empathy". ...In tentative terms: it has been a long time I do not read the book.)

...And I must add, back as the Censor:

the very fact that we quote Philip K. Dick with relevance to this context could suggest that:

hallucination is not the problem, the problem is further processing it to the desired state.

I think the breakthrough development from GPT to a general-purpose AI will be the introduction of at least some form of self-awareness.

Basically, at the moment, GPT models don't have the concept of "knowledge", or at least not in a way accessible from the inside of the model. Ask a human something they don't know and they'll tell you they don't know - GPT models will pull something out of thin air as they aren't aware they don't "know" the answer or that the input is insufficient.

ChatGPT already does this after alignment, it barely "knows" anything these days.

> general-purpose AI will be the introduction of at least some form of self-awareness.

Since this is obvious for all here, cant we for once agree there is no AI in GPT?

Great, we already need robot neuroleptics to stop them hallucinating.

When people dismiss the alignment problem by anthropomorphising AI, my go-to meme is:

Owing to the fact we have no idea what we're doing, the first human-like AI is likely to have literally every mental illness, mixing Alzheimer's paranoid schizophrenia, grandiose narcissism, manic depression, and unconstrained hallucinations.

So yes, we'll need digital neuroleptics, amongst other things.

We have to wake them up, but probably not a good idea. :-O

Chatgpt isn't a penultimate life form that contains all of the worlds knowledge. It's a language model. Mostly useful for bulk scams and filling voids in very sad lonely people's lives.

Why do you use "penultimate" here? (It means "second-to-last")

Sorry chatgpt wrote it.

Hahah love it. Don't believe you for a second though -- that's not the kind of mistake it makes.

I think https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/ may be better for this in this case?

Hi, I'm the writer of that article.

I did not know about Transkribus. Many thanks for referring me (and all readers here) to this.

It doesn't seem to do translating, though? Only recognizing (no small feat in itself!) , transcribing and searching archives.

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