Benjamin Breen of Res Obscura has been researching the different uses of AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude (from Anthropic), and as an enthusiast of demonology manuals, he decided to challenge the LLMs to translate a page out of the 16th century book titled Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex (lit. "Book Six of the Discourse on Magic") by Jesuit theologian Martin Delrio.
He made the endeavor much easier on himself by simply feeding the AI with an OCR-rendered image to extract the text and copied that onto the prompt. What follows is a rough translation of the passage, but intelligible to a certain extent. It may not be accurate but it can aid researchers, for example, in getting a quick idea of the essence of materials which they cannot translate on their own.
Claude apparently does a better job at translating than ChatGPT. However, he still concludes the same thing many others have said before, AI tools are merely tools and not replacements. What they can do is simply make the process faster and more efficient for us who would rather put our time and effort into more critical aspects of our work.
(Image credit: Bavarian State Library/Google Books)