Who knew this inscription wad about “Biggus Dickus” all along?
Google develops AI tool that fills missing words in Roman inscriptions
Submitted 2 months ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/23/google-ai-tool-roman-inscriptions-aeneas
Comments
dhork@lemmy.world 2 months ago
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Does it also mention his wife, Incontonentia Buttocks?
ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What about Naughtimus Maximus?
prex@aussie.zone 2 months ago
Who knew the Romans were such big fans of squarespace?
nyan@lemmy.cafe 2 months ago
It isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds when you consider that a lot of inscription texts are pretty formulaic—epitaphs, dedications, and such. Plus, we have plenty of surviving writings in classical Latin, so we know the grammar pretty well. Given those things, I’d expect an AI trained on the corpus of inscription texts that have survived without significant damage to be able to make reasonable suggestions about formulaic texts.
Really, when you think about it, a trained human presented with a damaged inscription text won’t be doing anything much different from what an LLM would do: they’ll try to fill in the text with the most likely words based on any remaining traces of letters, and their knowledge of other, similar texts. The problem is getting the LLM to communicate its level of certainty about the fill-ins it’s offering.
FishFace@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That and (at least for now) it may be difficult to communicate contextual information to an LLM that a human historian or philologist may be able to take in implicitly.
qwestjest78@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
What a joke
isodimensional@aussie.zone 2 months ago
This has actually been done for quite a long time. Roman historians could look up common words in databases from partial words and get a pretty good guess at the overall inscription from context.
db2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.
Lumidaub@feddit.org 2 months ago
I bet I could do that too, hallucinate some bullshit that seems like it could fit in the gaps.
SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Romanes eunt domus
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Seriously. lemmy.world/post/33375695