Comment by vintermann
2 months ago
I don't know about this project, but I can easily find thousands of images that gpt-4o can't read, but a human expert can. It can do typed text excellently, antika-style cursive if it's very neat, and kurrent-style cursive never.
For straightforward reasons, I am commenting on this project, not the space of all possible projects. I did try, once, to get 4o to decode the Zodiac Killer's message. It didn't work.
The point is that gpt-4o can't read cursive very well. The chain of thought reasoning doesn't seem to help at all. It's a thing the model doesn't generalize to, that's relevant to this discussion.
I'm sure you can find something it does a bad job on (have you, though?) but it's done swimmingly on some really horrendous 18th century examples I've found. Among other obvious things, it translates the Revolutionary War cursive that leads off this article.
I think people may be kidding themselves a little bit about this stuff.
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