The AI that’s remaking history

AI doesn’t just make stuff up – it’s helping us better understand the past, finds Lee Grant

- Lee Grant

Rarely does a month pass without PC Pro reporting on a new AI system, billed as forward-looking, autonomous and poised to improve our futures. What we don’t often hear about is the increasing utilisation of AI to examine our pasts.

Historians, archaeologists, musicians and data scientists are deploying AI technologies to re-imagine 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 also look at the bias and ethics of restorative-AI and consider how we should interpret and categorise such works. We’ll flick around a timeline, 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 who, somewhat contrarily, has always had a passion for computing. “I got into mapping and visual analysis, which led to trying to build a digital catalogue of all the inscriptions from ancient Sicily,” he said.