A lot of people are unimpressed with ChatGPT or similar LLMs because they've moved the goalposts into another country. I'm perpetually amazed that any part of it works at all. It's literally a function with a definition of just ```string chat(string tell_me_what_to_do)``` where the almost the entire content of the 'chat' function is just a handful of arrays of numbers. There wasn't an army of programmers programming specifics in there with if/else/do/while statements for different values of "what_to_do". You ask, it does it!
A random challenging-but-appropriate task I threw at it was to fix up and then summarize the text of a badly scanned book. The language is in a ~100 y.o. style, every second or third word has a scanning error, there's gaps, etc...
It not only cleaned it up (in seconds!), it wrote a nice condensed summary, and a valid critique when prompted. E.g.: it picked up that the author admitted to using only official sources from a single government for his information, which may introduce bias. Most people I know would not be able to write an insightful critique like that!
Then, I asked it to replace the proper names and place names from English with the original native spelling, but only for one country mentioned in the text. It did that correctly too. It didn't change any other names.
This isn't like Google Translate where there's a combo box where you can select "French" as the input language and "Japanese" or whatever as the output language. That function is "string translate( language from, language to, string text)". Its internals are complex code that took man-centuries of effort to write, and is fixed function. It does what it does. It can't fix up French placenames in a Japanese text to use French spelling, or replace romaji in French text with Hiragana.
Prompt: "Replace Japanese place names such as Tokyo in this French text with the Kanji equivalent, as would be written by a japanese native speaker."
Snippet of output: "À l'origine, 東京 (Tokyo) était un petit village de pêcheurs nommé 江戸 (Edo, « l'estuaire »). Fortifié au XVe siècle, 江戸 (Edo) devient la base militaire du shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu à la fin du XVIe siècle, puis la capitale de son gouvernement féodal. Durant l’époque d'江戸 (Edo, 1603-1868), la ville se développe et devient l'une..."
Notice how Tokugawa wasn't replaced? Well, that's because it's not a place name. I asked ChatGPT to replace place names, not other Japanese words.
Having said that, it's definitely not perfect, it makes mistakes, and can take a bit of poking and prodding to do exactly what was asked of it, especially for obscure languages or scenarios. But... that's moving the goalposts.
Ask yourself how long it would take you to write a function that can replace "words of a certain class" in text written in one language with the spelling from another language? Make sure you don't confuse cross-language homonyms, or words that can be a place name or have a different meaning depending on context, etc...
