Latinum Institute - AI generated Cicero's Latin - terribly bad

Iáson

Cívis Illústris

  • Civis Illustris

This depends on where you put the bar for 'fairly good Latin student'; I think anyone who could write 'habeunt' would be instantly disqualified from this title for me. I'm not sure you can really just set aside the appearance of random words from a different language... still, maybe old-style GT used to be even worse.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
'habeunt'
I hadn't seen that one—I admit I hadn't read that far. What I did read struck me as somewhat decent Latin with few real grammatical mistakes.
I'm not sure you can really just set aside the appearance of random words from a different language...
Of course I wouldn't set that aside if I were to rate the text. I was just saying that apart from those words (which are a dead giveaway that the text is AI-generated) the Latin is kind of decent.
still, maybe old-style GT used to be even worse.
A whole lot worse. The text above can be read and understood easily. GT 10 years ago mostly just produced utterly ungrammatical and incomprehensible word salad (sometimes you could guess what the English might have been, sometimes it was so bad you couldn't even do that).
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

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Location:
Belgium
I guess I'm just impressed by the difference between this and the old GT, and by the fact that AI now frankly outperforms many human Latin students (though the human standards these days are admittedly not very high).
 
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Iáson

Cívis Illústris

  • Civis Illustris

A whole lot worse. The text above can be read and understood easily. GT 10 years ago mostly just produced utterly ungrammatical and incomprehensible word salad (sometimes you could guess what the English might have been, sometimes it was so bad you couldn't even do that).
Yes, I suppose that's fair... at least here it is not particularly idiomatic but you can sort of work out what is meant (or at least what the English 'original' is) for a given definition of 'meaning'.
 

rothbard

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I'm starting to believe that we were a blessed last generation that was able to learn Latin the hard way without any "apparent" shortcuts like the AIs today. It has been only 15 years or so when I started a serious Latin study and yet it feels, due to the technological advancements, like it was several generations ago... the world changed so much.
My son goes to an expensive private school where mobile phones aren't allowed in, and teachers communicate with the parents the old fashioned way, by writing notes in a paper journal. We've gone from paying for technology to paying to have less of it.
 
 

Godmy

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Bohemia
Cool!
My son goes to an expensive private school where mobile phones aren't allowed in, and teachers communicate with the parents the old fashioned way, by writing notes in a paper journal. We've gone from paying for technology to paying to have less of it.
Right. So today you have to search for "islands" of where things are sort of as you remembered them to be.
 

Devenius Dulenius

Civis

  • Civis

Location:
Arkansas, USA
Yes. (see the video snippets)


Molendinarius was a pretty big person in the internet Latin world in the past. Back in the 2010 he was the guy behind the website "schola.ning" where there was like the first live both text and video Latin chat. Back then it seemed to be miraculous, since nothing like that apparently existed. Even Luigi Miraglia from the Vivarium Novum Academy once visited there and I could chat with him (in Latin) for a few minutes. He was big, then he joined the forum, but even when he had a very low number of posts, I remember I was one of the first who argued he should become a CI, because he was just "big" (both on Youtube and through other projects). That turned out to be a mistake.

And now it has devolved into this.... WOW!
I think not even him could have seen that coming all those years ago.

I'll try to see if I find his profile here.
I used his Schola site a little, for text updates (status updates). There was also an equivalent Ancient Greek one, Σχολη, which I also used. Alas, both eventually died. They had some good free resources also. Pity that they didn't survive.
 

rothbard

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A few years ago I got invited to a WhatsApp group with Evan. I remember his Latin was very good. It was a group for advanced learners; one could only write in Latin or ancient Greek. However, I remember that his online course used an oversimplified version of Eutropius, written by someone called John Stirling, which was essentially English written in Latin words, or Latin using an English construction (Pacifica commented "An easier version of the easiest Latin author!"). He tried to peddle recordings of himself reading out this bastardised version of Eutropius. I suspect this Epistula is similar, only written using AI.
 
 

Godmy

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Location:
Bohemia
I realize I'm getting now off topic, but one thing that I appreciate using AI for is debugging and other tech / coding related stuff. Being a power user on Windows (or Linux) has never been easier if you use e.g. Claude AI as an assistant. You just generate ideas and it generates command lines, batch files, scripts and code (but sometimes you gotta be more creative than the tool, if something doesn't work, it can get stuck trying to get it work while your own brain can work out a much simpler way to attempt, thinking out of the box is still more dependent on the human).

Some things that would take forever with Google (or would be thus impossible, because you wouldn't find your specific solution).

But that is off topic.

I can't imagine how modifying this forum would have been easier 3-4 years ago with such tools. Especially, when XenForo's own scripting language is 95% undocumented and you have to do lots of guessing and copy paste from complete scripts to achieve anything.

If there was something I would wish, it would be a Claude AI subscription, because I can do only so much before I run off the free prompts (and then I need to wait 5 hours). Claude is just supreme for coding... But it's not cheap.

But no Cicero, please!
 
 

Godmy

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Location:
Bohemia
It may be that our posts reached somewhere :D

Well, but he doesn't say much anyway in the post...

I suppose I will continue to steer myself away from the most commercial Latin teacher there is, haha :D
 
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