Hype rating
AI usage
Who benefits?
Classical scholars and researchers, linguists interested in ancient previously indecipherable texts..
What concerns does this bring up?
When a machine can do things a human cannot (unwrap damaged papyri) and also identify text elements far more efficiently than scholars with years of training, the concern is why would one expend the effort to acquire that expertise. It raises the question of what is worth studying and learning in the near future.
I wonder if the AI could not produce a text that in itself was made up, a hoax or hallucination, that would need an expert or several to determine the accuracy and veracity of the produced texts.
Additional comments
The article suggests that AI might be useful in decoding texts that until now have defied all scholarly efforts to identify the script systems. Linguists and anthropologists with years of training cannot hope to match the abilities of GAI to analyze and compare against millions of possibilities the unknown alphabets. Yet as with machine translation from Russian to English or the reverse, an editor or proof reader with sufficient skills and education is still required to check for accuracy. These jobs, however, pay considerably less than the fees once accorded to professional translators