Your mistake is thinking the picture in the thumbnail was the starting point, when that was the image generated by the algorithm created by the guy who won this award. The AI built these words off of a “crackle pattern” someone else identified from CT scans of the scroll

Farritor then trained a machine-learning model on Casey’s crackle pattern. He identified multiple ink strokes and more letters and used them as training data. His model started identifying letters and hints of words that weren’t visible to him. After he submitted his findings to the program, a panel of papyrologists noted 13 letters and identified that the hidden word is “Porphyras” which means “purple” and is a bit of a rarity in ancient texts.