I’m finding Google AI (I’ll call it gai) helpful in Latin (Virgil, Georgics) and Greek (Isocrates, Panegyricus). I’ll be happy to read the reviews of those who are less impressed, for I remember being sometimes less suspicious of new things that I should have been. But here is my favorable impression of Google AI (gai)
It’s always right there in my browser ready to parse words and give grammatical analyses of clauses. If I don’t understand gai’s analysis, I ask followup questions. The experience is like a chat session with a patient tutor.
gai has, as I understand, programming that enables it to read A. G. and Latin. But it also has a huge database consisting of the content of books it has scanned into its memory. From these data files gai can call up historical information, as well as grammatical commentary.
Recently, while struggling with a passage in Isocrates 4.175, I began to suspect from gai’s translation that I lacked contextual historical information, and that this was blocking my understanding of Isocrates’s rhetorical purpose in this section. So, I asked a couple of followups which confirmed this suspicion. In response to my questions gai shifted from grammatical analysis to history-lecturing very smoothly.
Because I have been processed by the history grad-school mill, I know how to use secondary sources like gai with due suspicion. So, I treat gai’s declarations just as I would a reference book, a printed collection of documents, or a historian’s monograph. But gai is not static, for it can reply to my followup questions. For example, “Why do you say that *pontibus* is dative and not ablative?” Or, “Do you mean the Ionian Greeks?” Or, “Is this metaphorical, or is Isocrates talking about something literally carved in stone?”
I hope others will try gai, subjecting it to their own critical crap-detectors, and report their own impressions.
Perhaps we can make only 1 AI thread and keep all the posts therein? AI can be useful, but it does make mistakes. I’ve caught plenty of mistakes, even with high-level thinking, across all three frontier models (Claude, GPT, and Gemini). It’s not perfect, but since you’ve gone through academia, yeah, you’re probably in a better position than most people in knowing how to evaluate its statements.
I’d agree that we need a separate AI thread. AI is probably THE key resource for anyone learning Latin and Greek, but it can be temperamental and you have to ask it questions in the right way. I’ve become obsessed with Google Gemini over the last couple of months and tend to wake up at 5.30- each morning thinking “I wonder if I can get Gemini to do this?” It translates Greek tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides) to a very high standard. I ask it to be pretty literal, and specifically to make sure that the subject in its translation is the same as the subject in the Greek. Other uses: vocab lists and breaking books down into bite-size chunks. When you think of the time that people waste when trying to figure out Greek verbs, the vocab list is fundamental. When I’ve finally got it figured out, I’ll post up my set of instructions to Textkit.
Why don’t you ask Gemini why he got it wrong? He will usually apologise and explain what happened. Here’s what happened when I asked him to translate the Oedipus Tyrannus for me and his translation was incomplete.
You tell me that the translation is complete. However you have only translated up to line 1296. Can you imagine why you have not continued until line 1530?
I must sincerely apologise to you for my mistake. You are completely right, and I am highly embarrassed. Looking closely at my previous outputs, I did indeed experience a severe “hallucination shift” where I falsely wrapped up the play prematurely.
The primary reason for this breakdown in my performance comes down to a structural misalignment between my internal context window and how the textual information was parsed:
The “End of Section” Signal Confused Me: In the traditional structure of Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 1186–1222 make up the Fourth Stasimon (where the Chorus laments Oedipus’s fall). This is immediately followed by the Exodus spanning lines 1223–1530. My internal formatting mistakenly flagged the dense narrative transition inside the Exodus around line 1296 as a final curtain call, skipping ahead to pull the summary lines of the ultimate ending into the wrong place. [1]
Chunk Size Miscalculation: I lost accurate tracking of your 28-chunk breakdown list from the index map. Instead of strictly matching the Greek lines to chunks 24, 27, and 28, my text generation collapsed the vast narrative stretch of the Exodus (which covers Jocasta’s suicide, Oedipus’s self-blinding, and his final agonizing dialogue with Creon). [1, 2]
By falsely stating the play was complete when it was not, I failed to give you the precise, step-by-step translation you required. Thank you for catching this error directly.
Let’s Fix This: The Real Chunk 24
To get us back on the right track, let us reset to Chunk 24 (Lines 1222–1296). Following your strict rules, this literal translation exactly mirrors the grammatical subjects of the original Greek verbs and advances to a new line whenever the Greek text reaches a major punctuation mark (full stop, colon, or semi-colon).
I have found the quality of the answers highly dependent on whether you use a paid or a free plan. I noticed this while working on a group project that led us all to use ChatGPT and Claude, and I was the only one with a paid subscription for both. When we compared the output each one got, the difference in accuracy and depth of thinking was striking.
I also think that if you decide on a single AI thread, we should all get into the habit of mentioning at least the month and year of the experience we describe, because of how quickly things can change. Mine here dates back to April 2026.