History Remastered: From Ancient Ash to Faded Ink

‍I am a non traditional history major at Murray State University in Kentucky. One of my earliest passions and interests in life was history with a concentration on the religious or paranormal an even earlier interest was video games that caused a chain reaction which led to an interest in computer games which led to interest in computers which led to an interest in graphic design, web design, cybersecurity, gaming, content creation, community building, coding, then finally theoretical AI in books followed by the consumer chatbot AI that no book had prepared me for. I am not an expert or an executive, I am an enthusiast.

The Vesuvius Challenge and AI's Role in Historical Preservation

Researchers at the University of Kentucky recently won a prize of 1 million dollars in a contest called the Vesuvius challenge. Every so often the University of Kentucky gets the international spotlight shined on them like they did with the invention of the artificial heart. So it is again with the invention of this artificial intelligence “unwrapping” software meant to be able to unwrap ancient scrolls such as the ones in the Vesuvius challenge for the last 20 years a professor at the University of Kentucky has been working on this software. “Now, six months since the competition began, the Greek characters, πορφύραc, revealed as meaning "purple dye" or "clothes of purple," are among the multiple characters and lines of text that have been extracted.” (“UK at the Half: AI Reads Text from 2,000-Year-Old Herculaneum Scrolls | University of Kentucky Research,” n.d.)

The significance of this breakthrough is that potentially all of the ancient scrolls that we have or find can not be unwrapped due to their age or due to damage such as char, they can be unwrapped using this artificial intelligence software. Once fully developed this could lead to rapid advances in what we know about history.

Experimenting with AI-Assisted Historiography

I personally have experimented with AI assisted historiography using a chatbot GPT model. I have uploaded a photograph of a letter penned by Clara Barton who founded the American Red Cross. The letter was part of a volunteer project that I learned about in an assignment in a college class where the professor was teaching us how to transcribe historical documents. It was basically just looking at the document and making guesses until you could get it to make sense. At a later date I decided to stop using free consumer GPT AI and subscribe to consumer GPT AI that has more powerful capabilities and try to transcribe one of the letters using it. These are the results that I received from that. ‍

‍

“The handwriting is quite faded and difficult to make it in many parts, but I can try

Transcribing what I can decipher from the legible portions:

Left page (205): “...impressed and in responsive…desire to have…country…that it may

Successful…our mission…obligations…brothers and sisters…around us said

to …tribulations…until we…”

Right page (206):”...truly everything that could…approved. …very first thing which… the

Army of the Potomac… Gen. McClellan’s order…you that in all…been…of the rebellion…their

Hearts…”I’ve done my best to transcribe the clearer words and phrases verbatim from the image, but much of the handwriting is too faded or stylized for me to confidently make out full sentences with complete accuracy. Please let me know if you need any clarification or have additional questions!”

The Future of Historiography with AI

As  you can see, what was once educated guess work is now supported by machine intelligence, and this was done by low cost consumer AI not big budget industrial artificial intelligence. When budget friendly AI like the one I used to do this becomes just a little more intelligent it will make volunteer projects like the one to transcribe Clara Barton's letters a breeze, preserving history for future generations.

History Remastered

I titled this article History Remastered because just like when your favorite movie or song came out you may not have noticed at the time that it was a little blurry or distorted but years later when a new hit came out you noticed your old favorite could not compete. Sometimes when that happens the music or movie producer will remaster the film or track making the imagery or audio sound better. That's what AI is doing to history. It's remastering it brings it new clarity so that we may witness it again today with our own eyes.

(“UK at the Half: AI Reads Text from 2,000-Year-Old Herculaneum Scrolls | University of Kentucky Research,” n.d.)