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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

OCR is hard, but maybe we can make some real progress on it now with modern AI. A context-smart church records handwriting transcriber would be pretty great.

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The problem with that is the same as the problem with all modern AI, it seems: AI hallucinations, which get more plausible the better the model is. Humans see things, too, but humans can have the insight to know when they're unsure and leave lacunae in the transcription with a note to come back later and discuss it with others. AIs don't have that ability, and so always seem certain.

No, they already have the ability to be uncertain if you are careful what you ask for. And I don't buy that it's some fundamental weakness: I'm sure we'll be much better at dealing with uncertainty a month and a year from now.

But of course, they will always sometimes be wrong, just like humans.

It's not cheap but GPT-4 handles it. I'm in the image processing private beta and its failure rate on text is well below the human baseline. Cursive, damaged, pixelated, 5 year old hand writing, weird lighting or angles, highly stylized, artificially distorted or obstructed, poor contrast. Doesn't matter.

My instincts tell me they haven't made it public yet because it will end captchas for good and they're uneasy about rug pulling the entire public internet. Any image obfuscated to a point of defeating the LLM will also defeat the majority of humans.

Can I suggest some truly horrible church record handwriting for you to try?

Here's a fairly moderate example:

https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/7442/155

https://readcoop.eu transckribus is quite nice for handwritten ocr.

Know of any good handwritten OCR libraries that are FOSS? And ideally can be called through python? TrOCR is the best I've seen so far though it's not amazing.

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