Chat GPT and Koine Greek

Bible Study software, Unicode, Fonts, Keyboards, creating Web pages in Greek, and other software issues.
Ken M. Penner
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Joined: May 12th, 2011, 7:50 am
Location: Antigonish, NS, Canada
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Re: Chat GPT and Koine Greek

Post by Ken M. Penner »

Matthew Longhorn wrote: March 28th, 2023, 6:42 am Do you see these becoming useful tools that can provide reliable data consistently for beginner/intermediate folk in the near future? Or something that will require careful filtering for bad data for foreseeable future and therefore more of a risk than a benefit?
Yes and no.

One way they can help the study of biblical Greek is by sparking ideas, which can be helpful, e.g., to break through writer's block (or reader's block). I wouldn't consider them reliable. ChatGPT 3.5 was an interesting conversation partner but its claims were too often wildly wrong and untraceable. So at this point they require careful filtering.
But you also ask about "becoming", "in the near future", "for the foreseeable future." What I'm impressed by is the improvement from 3.5 to 4 in just a few months, and the increased reliability brought by Bing's ability to look things up. If they follow that trajectory, I can foresee them becoming very useful in just a few years.
I can imagine AI bringing about a revolution as significant as the internet.
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
MAubrey
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Joined: May 6th, 2011, 8:52 pm
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Re: Chat GPT and Koine Greek

Post by MAubrey »

Ken M. Penner wrote: March 28th, 2023, 8:00 am If they follow that trajectory, I can foresee them becoming very useful in just a few years.
I can imagine AI bringing about a revolution as significant as the internet.
As long as their datasets are left unpublished and commercial companies continue exploit global south labor, I will continue to op-out of this revolution.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Rayakin
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Joined: October 6th, 2025, 11:04 am
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Re: Chat GPT and Koine Greek

Post by Rayakin »

ChatGPT (and other LLMs) is highly context dependent, so while it may have a hard time producing an accurate response based on a single question without any context, it will do MUCH better if you give it more context for your questions.

So, for example, if you are trying to understand the middle voice, try uploading a couple of journal articles on that topic and then asking it to explain in light of those articles.

ChatGPT can crawl the web, so you can also either give it web pages to help direct its answers or you can just ask it to "think hard" which means it will spend a lot more time before answering and do more research on its own.

I have been playing with building AI tooling for Greek education for almost a year now and I have been able to get the feedback to be a lot more accurate and better (not perfect, but definitely useful!).

For example, I built a platform called Koine Guide that converts every verse in the New Testament into an interactive parsing quiz and translation exercise, and I give AI (chatgpt) feedback on the user's translation and a letter grade. To accomplish that, I have a master file for every verse of the NT that explains the Greek in that verse, lists acceptable translations, and notes grammatical nuances and important things someone who is trying to translate that verse should know. Then every time a user submits their translation, I pass that large file along with their translation so that ChatGPT can actually provide meaningful feedback to the user. It is working quite well!

Now, the trick is just making sure I have those context rich files as dialed in as possible to give better feedback to users. 8-)

I have a couple of prompts too that I can share if anyone is interested and helped!
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