Engineering your own voynich

[Mark Knowles]

ChatGPT often generates bullshit when it doesn't have a clue.

Despite getting the decipherment completely wrong, it appears, I am actually more impressed at ChatGPT's attempt at decipherment here than I have been at any attempt to decipher the Voynich of a human so far.

In fact nobody seems to have tried to crack Voynichese as if it were a cipher. The focus seem to be on compiling statistics, which whilst certainly useful is dancing around the problem. It sometimes feels like many researchers have never tried to break a cipher and so would have no idea where to start with trying to decipher Voynichese. Sometimes one learns by trying and failing and then trying again.

I think with a few more iterations of these Large Language Models we might well end up with something that could take on the Voynich and win. I hope this is not the case and it will be disappointing if the victory is stolen from humans by a machine.