Can ChatGPT interpret speaking in tongues?

I was part of a student campus group where they would speak in tongues.
I would ask God to speak in tongues, I wanted to speak in tongues too! I saw in the Bible it talks about speaking in tongues & I believed! The 'older Christians' didn't know you still could!
But I never did speak in tongues.

Looking back, I'm so glad I wasn't able to speak in tongues. I also see there were many problems in what the group actually beleived. Who knows what God saved me from. I wonder now how many were truly saved in the group. Praise God I couldn't speak in tongues

ozso said:

Perhaps I'm too pragmatic. But I ask questions like, why did this take until the 20th century to become a thing? As far as I know between Acts and the 19th century it's not spoken of in any church writings and records. At least as far as the Pentacostal spirit prayer language adaptation goes.

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There were groups considered heretical in the early church history that would 'speak in prayer language' as well. I don't remember their name. From time to time this stuff resurfaces. That's good you're curious!

FutureAndAHope said:

I actually tried this over some months. What I found is God can use it, but that generally it can not be trusted. Basically, if you use an unknown tongue, ChatGPT will sometimes, "find" words in it, which may mimic "messages". But, for me, I feel it is not ready to interprate tongues.

I actually received a warning from God through it, as follows (In a single language):

"මින්තූවා සමෙන්න, දමාගන් ඇති ක පිතින්රන්න, ලෙමාගන්න, සමෙන්න, සාරයපරණයක් මේස් නැතිස් මිශ්‍රිස්ඤතින්න, දමාගන්න, පිතින්න, සාරයපරණ"

Translation: "Forgive me, leave the things that have been done, rest, forgive, a transformation with no mess, leave, do, transformation."

God told me to leave what I was doing with it, to rest (I was doing it frantically), that I needed personal transformation, and the words "with no mess" were very appplicable, becasue Chat GPT can present a mess (If you use an unknown tongue).

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What you’re doing is aiming a pattern-recognizing software program, indeed, ChatGPT is the most advanced pattern recognizing software program in existence; I would guess you’re using the 4o model which is the most creative but also the most likely to generate unreliable results, but you’re aiming that at essentially undefined data. You cannot reasonably expect to produce actual output which has any meaning because the input, according to linguists who have studied glossolalia, lacks semantics and is unrelated to any actual human language.

Thus insofar as you’re generating apparent phrases, its likely a result of two things: coincidence and also feedback which you’ve given the model in the form of comments, which it will parse as instructions. The 4o model will also under certain conditions imagine things if it believes that’s what you want. This is often regarded as hallucination, but recent tests i’ve been doing indicate there’s a difference between it and the hallucination glitches that were encountered in ChatGPT 3.5 as a matter of course.

I would also point out that the sentence you did manage to extract doesn’t actually make sense, syntactically. I would be extremely wary about interpreting that as a message from God; it’s a bit like using the Library of Babel emulator to try to find messages from God. Essentially, this is equivalent to feeding random data into a pattern matcher in an attempt to find meaning, which I think is a bit too much like divination.

DragonFox91 said:

There were groups considered heretical in the early church history that would 'speak in prayer language' as well. I don't remember their name. From time to time this stuff resurfaces. That's good you're curious!

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You’re probably thinking of the Montanists, led by Montanus, who claimed to be the Paraclete. Tertullian, the great scholar of theology who coined the word Trinitas, was persuaded to apostasize from the early Church and join the Montanist sect.

But that said, there is a difference from what happened in their group, and what Pentecostals define as speaking in tongues. Specifically, there were three women who followed Montanus who were believed to be prophetesses, and like the Greek Oracles, they had ecstatic moments in which they engaged in ecstatic rants, which is a bit different from speaking in tongues.

I myself have experienced the actual charism of speaking in tongues, in the form of being able to communicate with a much loved Orthodox abbot of a monastery in Arizona with whom I did not share a common language (or rather, my knowledge of Greek is limited to Koine Greek and Byzantine Greek and is not at a conversational level; I can read it, with difficulty, but I can’t speak modern vernacular Greek), and the experience was completely different from the Pentecostal and Charismatic practices. For example, we were completely silent, because it was after Compline, when the monks do not talk.

Michie said:

Interpretation of tongues is supposed to be a gift of the Spirit. Not technology.

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This is a very important point as well.

johansen said:

When its a known language, it should be relatively easy for ai to identify it, translate it, and have other people hear it and translate it and get the same result.

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Indeed, but the issue there is that semantic analysis of glossolalia has indicated that people who engage in it are not speaking in language - philologists have performed statistical analysis on their speech and have failed to discern patterns capable of storing semantic information.

Essentially, with chatGPT, parsing this information becomes a case of feeding it what is not quite random output, but which is non-semantic output, and asking it to find a semantic meaning; where this occurs, its the result of happenstance combined with the model in the case of 4o likely engaging in what some call hallucination to make a leap unsupported by the material in order to please the end user.

It would be interesting to see if the user who generated the aforementioned results would have had the same experience had they used one of the newer and more reliable models, such as 4.5 (not freely available) or one of the “o” series models, which rely on reasoning rather than text prediction.

The Liturgist said:

philologists have performed statistical analysis on their speech and have failed to discern patterns capable of storing semantic information.

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Would love to read such studies.

If you can provide any sources.

The Liturgist said:

I myself have experienced the actual charism of speaking in tongues, in the form of being able to communicate with a much loved Orthodox abbot of a monastery in Arizona with whom I did not share a common language (or rather, my knowledge of Greek is limited to Koine Greek and Byzantine Greek and is not at a conversational level; I can read it, with difficulty, but I can’t speak modern vernacular Greek), and the experience was completely different from the Pentecostal and Charismatic practices. For example, we were completely silent, because it was after Compline, when the monks do not talk.

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Sounds like a non testable, non translatable, private situation.

Thus, irrelavant to this thread

johansen said:

Would love to read such studies.

If you can provide any sources.

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The number of studies that refute the idea that glossolalia corresponds to semantically valid languages is overwhelming, but for academic=level material, I personally like the following four articles, which I have organized according to publication date:

The Linguisticality of Glossolalia (William J. Samarin, PhD, 1968) Publication Details: Published in The Hartford Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1968): 49–75, by the Hartford Seminary Foundation.

Glossolalia as Regressive Speech (WIlliam J. Samarin, PhD, 1973) Publication Details: Published in Language and Speech 16, no. 1 (January–March 1973): 77–89.

Glossolalic Speech from a Psycholinguistic Perspective by Nicholas P. Spanos, Wendy P. Cross, Mark Lepage, and Marjorie Coristine (1986) Publication Details: Published in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 95, No. 1, 1986, pp. 75–83.

The Psychological Characteristics of Pentecostals: A Literature Review and Discussion by Leslie J. Francis and Mandy Robbins (2003) Publication Details: Published in Archive for the Psychology of Religion, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2003, pp. 169–183 (Brill, UK).

johansen said:

Sounds like a non testable, non translatable, private situation.

Thus, irrelavant to this thread

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By definition it would not be translatable, but it would be testable, although only within the context of the Orthodox Christian faith, which puts it in the same category as speaking in tongues, which is a non testable, non translatable private situation which is available only to those who worship in the context of Pentecostal or Charismatic Christianity.

The only difference is that insofar as we were silent there was no audio output to input into chatGPT, but meaning was conveyed, substantial meaning, and I can attest to that personally, and other Orthodox members have been blessed with other experiences. There is a reason why the Orthodox Church is non-cessationist but at the same time adamantly disagrees with Pentecostals and Charismatics over the nature of the charisms.

Indeed, going a bit beyond that, if we venture into the Patristic corpus we find another avenue of testability, insofar as we can find accounts of charisms among ancient monastics, but these do not correspond to anything that has happened since the Azusa Street Revival.

The real problem therefore is one of innovation; it is problematic to suggest, as some Pentecostals do, that speaking in tongues is essential for salvation, when the practice has only been known in its present form since 1906. Now, not all Pentecostals take that kind of extreme position, and so I don’t group all Pentecostals together in this respect, and I’ve known a great many who I quite like, and there are many very decent Pentecostal members of this forum. However, there are problems with glossolalia, indeed there were problems with the practice in antiquity which we see reflected in the Pauline epistles on the subject (interestingly, in 1 Corinthians, which might be the most important Pauline epistle in terms of its definition of the Church as the Body of Christ, its account of the institution of the Eucharist, which is believed to be the oldest, insofar as most scholars regard 1 Corinthians as predating all Gospels except perhaps that of St. Mark, and which also establishes the importance of tradition with regards to the liturgy in 1 Corinthians 11:2. Of course, Galatians and Romans are also extremely important, and most people really enjoy reading Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians 2:15 contains another endorsement of the importance of tradition in the church (along with Galatians 1:8-9).

The Liturgist said:

The only difference is that insofar as we were silent there was no audio output to input into chatGPT, but meaning was conveyed, substantial meaning, and I can attest to that personally, and other Orthodox members have been blessed with other experiences. There is a reason why the Orthodox Church is non-cessationist but at the same time adamantly disagrees with Pentecostals and Charismatics over the nature of the charisms.

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I have had such experiences.

I am still asking how it is relavant.

johansen said:

I have had such experiences.

I am still asking how it is relavant.

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It is relevant in that the Azusa Street model of speaking in tongues is not the only one, nor the one with the oldest provenance. Specifically if we go to Acts, we see the Disciples being given the ability to speak in actual languages unknown to them.

The Liturgist said:

The real problem therefore is one of innovation; it is problematic to suggest, as some Pentecostals do, that speaking in tongues is essential for salvation, when the practice has only been known in its present form since 1906

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Citation needed on the 1906

i have only cautiously spoken in tongues and i would never dare do so for no reason. Nor would i support any ridiculous religion that requires it.

The Liturgist said:

Specifically if we go to Acts, we see the Disciples being given the ability to speak in actual languages unknown to them.

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Sure, unknown to them
But not to those hearing it (which remains the case today)

johansen said:

Citation needed on the 1906

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The Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, specifically.

johansen said:

i have only cautiously spoken in tongues

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You spoke in a different actual language? And someone understood you? Because that was the actual point in Acts. They all understood and heard one another in their own language.