Regarding our possible pedagogical redundancy:

Bhagavad-gītā:
14.6 tatra sattvaṃ nirmalatvāt prakāśakam
14.7 sattvāt sañjāyate jñānaṃ

I take this to mean that there is a unique, inspiring, and irreplaceable role for the virtuous teacher. 

Best,
Howard

On Nov 27, 2023, at 7:10 PM, Ananya Vajpeyi via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

To my mind, the more pressing question is whether AI will imminently obviate our work as teachers, linguists, translators and philologists, and render us completely redundant in any sort of pedagogical role. 
AV. 

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 8:13 AM Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
Minor clarification.  The examples I gave are from Google Translate not ChaptGPT but clearly what you say makes sense to that also. 
 I'm wondering how does an AI application learn how to translate a language.  Do human beings program in a bunch of translation rules of how to translate language x to language y  and then these human beings refine the rules over time.  Or is there a kind of general artificial intelligence programmed into a computer that is just fed thousands of sentences and their translations and from that it learns how to translate language x to language y and with more sentences fed in, it itself refines its translation ability.? In other words learning language translation almost like a human being, by practice.

Harry Spier


On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 5:39 PM Antonia Ruppel <antonia.ruppel@gmail.com> wrote:
The use of the past active participle to render the English past active is to be expected: it’s the standard/most common way to render the past tense in modern/spoken Sanskrit as taught eg by Samskrta Bharati, and I assume that that’s the sort of Sanskrit that ChatGPT is trained on. Not applying external sandhi also is not uncommon in modern Sanskrit, at least as used by those who aren’t complete masters of the language the way eg Madhav is. 

Antonia 

On Mon 27 Nov 2023 at 23:29, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
Madhav wrote:
I hear that students are already beginning to use Google-Translator to do their Sanskrit homework.

I just did a little experiment.  Taking a few of the english translations in Apte's  "The Student's Guide to Sanskrit Composition" and comparing what Google Translator gave as a sanskrit translation of these, and comparing to the original sanskrit quotes .  A couple of surprising things stood out.  Surprising because these are fundamental things nothing subtle.  Google translator seems to use sanskrit past active participle to translate english simple past.  It doesn't seem to apply visarga sandhi, a completely mechanical process.

In these examples, the yellow highlighted sanskrit is the citation from Apte, the blue highlighted sanskrit is the google sanskrit translation of Apte's english translation given below.

 Rama saw govinda

rāmo govindamapaśyat

rāmaḥ govindaṁ dṛṣṭavān


I Salute the parents of the universe, Parvati and Paramesvara.

jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau

viśvasya mātāpitarau pārvatīṁ parameśvaraṁ ca namāmi


He washed his hands and feet.

hastau pādau cākṣālayat

saḥ hastapādau prakṣālitavān।


She shut her eyes

sā locane nyamīlayat |

sā netrāṇi nimīlitavatī


So says the revered Shankara

iti śrīśaṁkārācāryāḥ |

tathā vadati pūjyaḥ śaṅkaraḥ।


Thou art, therefore, a friend.

tasmāt sakhā tvam asi

tena tvaṁ mitram asi


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