First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years
www.bbc.co.uk
The document charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is being 'unwrapped' using X-ray scans and AI.

It’s a 10m papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, one of the cities buried by Vesuvius’ volcanic ash in 79 CE. It’s fully carbonised but they’re using a synchrotron to create a 3D model of the scroll without damaging it. Then they’re using AI (pattern recognition AI, perhaps?) to detect signs of ink, so they can reconstruct the text itself.

The project lead Stephen Parson claims that they’re confident that they “will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety”. And so far it seems to be a work of philosophy.

  • Radioactive Butthole@reddthat.comEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    This is what bothers me so much about the vocally anti-ai people. Like, yes, OpenAI is another grift and the tech bros are trying (and succeeding) at bending the tech to serve their profits. However, the underlying tech is fucking cool and has lots of potential applications.

    We shouldn’t stop researching neural nets just because like 5 assholes want to abuse it; we should just regulate the space and outlaw that kind of abuse of power.