The Al that's remaking history

Al doesn't just make stuff up-it's also helping us to understand the past better. Lee Grant explains how...

RARELY DOES a month pass without a new AI system hitting the news, with the tech labeled as forward-looking, autonomous, and poised to improve our futures. What we don’t often hear about is the increasing utilization of AI to examine our pasts.

Historians, archaeologists, musicians, and data scientists are deploying AI technologies to reimagine and re-create historical moments. We’ll explore the immense human challenges in getting the best results from AI machines, and, as you’ll discover, there’s no magic bullet computing at work.

Like so many tales from the evolution of modern computing, success with AI is grounded in the values of collaboration, opportunity, and experimentation. The challenges our experts face require distinct technical solutions while sharing striking amounts of commonality.

We’ll look at the bias and ethics of restorative AI and consider how we should interpret and categorize such works. We’ll also consider a timeline of AI, stopping at points between the modern day and the ancient world, hearing from people who have used AI to expand our perspective of historical events, enhance familiar sights and sounds, and even rewrite the history books. AI is already changing our perceptions of the past. Welcome to reality.

Filling in the gaps

Jonathan Prag is a professor of ancient history at Oxford University in the United Kingdom and has always had a passion for computing. “I got into mapping and visual analysis, which led to trying to build a digital catalog of all the inscriptions from ancient Sicily,” he says.