AI is being used to translate 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets
With the rise of ChatGPT and the like, AI has entered the mainstream public consciousness. As well as various philosophical concerns or potential economic effects, talk about AI inevitably brings up the topic of the end of civilization.
It may be more relevant to civilization's beginning, however. AI is broadly software that's able to learn, reason, and infer meaning, and that makes it a wonderful tool for translating ancient or dead languages.
A team of archaeologists and computer scientists have created an AI program with exactly that purpose in mind. Specifically, this AI is being used to translate tablets with Akkadian texts using cuneiform script, some of which date back to 2,500 BCE. It's like a super Google Translate.
Akkadian was a language spoken in parts of Mesopotamia, an area now belonging to modern Iraq. According to the authors of the paper published at PNAS Nexus (via Heritage Daily), there are hundreds of thousands of these clay tablets, but because there's only a limited number of available experts in Akkadian texts, most of them remain untranslated. Mesopotamian languages aren't my strong suit, that's for sure.
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The researchers claim the AI is able to achieve 97% accuracy at translating the Akkadian cuneiform script to Latin, which is a much easier task than translating to English, with its more complicated sentence structures.
The AI performed well when tasked with translating formally written text, such as royal decrees or those written by scholars. It does tend to struggle with literary texts, producing what are called «hallucinations», which are
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