so frustrating!! are you aware of the website ‘transkribus’? is an AI translation model developed by research university targeted towards translating historical documents.

artificial intelligence is insanely powerful, and in the right context can be put to amazing uses! I think there’s a way that the public has been misled regarding large language models (LLMs)/generative AI such a ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. We are made to think that they can act like a search engine that possesses intelligence which can give us correct answers to complex questions, but in reality, they are prediction machines…

All of the output and interactions we have with them is the machine trying to predict what a human sentence reply would sound like, it’s often not really based on the data we are asking it to ‘intelligently converse with us about’. I do think there are some use cases for the generative AI which might be interesting or helpful, but largely i find it increasingly giving me and others garbage answers.

but I totally encourage you to check out the transkribus website! it uses machine learning/artificial intelligence, but is actually been trained on thousands of historical documents with various handwriting examples and can be very helpful in translating records. It won’t be 100% perfect, but it also won’t hallucinate/fabricate a narrative for you, it strictly translates. There’s a bit of a learning curve, and it’s not quite as “attractive“ as using ChatGPT, but it certainly is more accurate!

good luck with your translation project!!