For centuries, historians have been piecing together fragments of ancient texts to understand the Roman Empire. But what if there was a way to speed up this process and uncover new information? Enter Aeneas, a generative AI model developed by Google DeepMind that’s been trained on Ancient Roman texts.

Aeneas has already made headlines for pinpointing the date of Emperor Augustus’ epigraph, “Res Gestae Divi Augusti,” to around 15 CE. But what makes this AI so special is its ability to mimic what historians do – retrieving relevant contextual information, uncovering isolated texts, and analyzing them before arriving at a conclusion.

The researchers behind Aeneas put the model through its paces in a new paper published in Nature. They found that it provided helpful information for historians in most cases, further cementing its apparent usefulness. “State-of-the-art generative models are now helping to turn epigraphy from a specialist discipline into a cutting-edge field of historical enquiry,” said study coauthor and classics and ancient history professor Alison Cooley.

Traditionally, historians have had to comb through various archives all over the world in search of parallels – ancient texts with similar wording or from the same era. By using this method, researchers can extrapolate what missing fragments may be saying or their context. But this process is long and tedious, requiring years of specialized training.

Aeneas changes this dynamic by providing useful research starting points in 90 percent of cases, improving historians’ confidence in key tasks by 44 percent. And when human historians work with the AI model together, the results are even better compared to Aeneas or the historians working alone.

But what about the risk of Aeneas “hallucinating” fake results? The model gives probabilities on its predictions, and in this case, it exactly reflected the current difference in scholars’ opinions. “In doing so, it gave two probable date ranges rather than a single precise one,” said Cooley.

The study’s findings suggest that Aeneas is just one of a growing suite of AI tools helping historians reveal more details about the ancient world. With its ability to speed up and improve historical research, Aeneas is revolutionizing the field in ways previously unimaginable.

Inspired by

• https://futurism.com/ai-google-deepmind-ancient-rome

Sources

• livius.org
• britannica.com
• nytimes.com
• blog.google
• nature.com