onion-ass headline
"AI will let us read 'lost' ancient works in the library at Herculaneum for the first time" vs. "No It Won't"
In this case "AI" means "advanced relative of OCR," not a chatbot. If it's the same tech I've seen talked about before, it's basically using imaging techniques that penetrate or pass through the material and then trying to analyze the resulting data to figure out what's ink and what's paper and what layer it's on and turn that into something researchers can look at and decipher. The script and language are both known (it's just some classical greek dialect), the problem is that the scrolls are so heavily damaged that they can't be looked at normally.
yay a rare "AI" where its used to hype a barely related cool thing instead of ruining a cool thing with shit-ass chat bots. i was fearing it was gonna be a bot trained on ancient corpus "filling in" lacunae
I can already read "lost ancient works in the library at Herculaneum for the first time", it's just 12 words and most of them are very common English vocabulary anyways.
