Birthday Bash Live Panel Discussion: AI in Ancient Studies

In the tapestry of existence, Artificial Intelligence is a new thread which is getting entwined with every industry, every academic discipline, and many facets of life. AI products are beginning to exert influence in numerous aspects of everyday life; it is altering how we live, think, and work, stretching its strands into areas that were once thought to be exclusively the purview of human expertise.

One particularly interesting frontier is the use of AI in humanities research. Research has previously relied exclusively on human analysis and interpretation, however, with the development of AI, it is now increasingly outsourced to machine learning technologies and has the potential for disrupting traditional research and teaching methods. Recently, researchers at DeepMind and Ca' Foscari University of Venice utilized a neural network dubbed Ithaca to recreate missing pieces of inscriptions and assign dates and places to ancient texts. In another instance, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, a professor at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, utilized network analysis programs to reconstruct links within 14th-century Byzantine Church documents which uncovered obscured contributions of women to the social fabric. AI was utilized to evaluate paleoclimate data in a recent study that was published in Nature. This analysis revealed information about past climate patterns and how they affected historical occurrences.

But how much can this inhuman entity make sense of human experience?

AI has enormous potential, but it also presents new ethical, moral, and practical dilemmas. With the development of deepfakes, the fabrication of false historical records, threatens our shared sense of history. Additionally, students and scholars using instruments which they are not trained in without fully understanding the ramifications raises ethical concerns.

The future of AI and the study of the ancient past represents a chapter yet to be written. While it could be filled with promise, how far should we go? Join us as practitioners of this field attempt to address this question.

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