Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of ancient warfare answers. I'm Murray, your host,

and I'll get onto a very controversial question in a second, but of course you can ask us a question,

and I can attempt to answer it for your 10-minute weekly fix of ancient warfare. Now, you can, of course you can ask us a question and I can attempt to answer it for your 10 minute weekly

fix of ancient warfare. Now, you can of course back us on patreon.com forward slash ancient

warfare podcast. You can back us at one of three levels, legionary, optio or centurion. Now, the question

comes from Mark on Patreon. Assuming it's not being done already, do you see there being a place for AI in helping to translate ancient manuscripts?

Listening to the Neo-Assyrian episode, Murray mentioned that there were more ancient texts in that space than could be translated in our lifetime.

Could AI step up and help us with this and sort and categorize through keywords names, etc. Now, I must

state up first. I'm not a fan of AI. Don't like AI. Don't like AI. I don't like AI art. I don't

like AI chat GDP. And I'm worried about the future of things where people want to use AI for

everything. Having said that, I think AI is a great tool when used properly.

When it's used to cheat or to steal other people's work or ideas, I do not like it at all.

But as a tool, it is a very interesting and fascinating advance.

And in that regard, assuming it's not being done already,

it is being done already. I saw an article just the other day about AI being used to decipher

hit type texts. Because of course, the thing about AI is it is a compilation of known knowledge.

And so if you load a grammar into it, it will detect those aspects of grammar and those different cuneiform shapes and word forms in the text that we have.

And it can do it very quickly because it can scan it and then go for it.

Whereas what you're relying on with a human mind is them having the time, the skill to be able to read a text.

Now, of course, in a lot of cases, and not just ancient near Eastern texts, but some Greek and Latin as well,

sometimes the word form is about interpretation.

So in a way, AI might be able to speculate, but it won't be able to determine whether a word form is a particular one or another.

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