Ancient/Now - March 6th - Rewriting History with AI
What happens when artificial intelligence comes for the past?
Rewriting history with AI
Today deepfakes and fake news are a disturbing and ever-growing problem. The danger posed by bad actors using artificial intelligence (AI) to commit fraud, spread disinformation, and generally rob our society of a collective sense of reality and shared understanding of facts is front-and-center to today’s public discourse, along with possible solutions like digital watermarking technology. But what happens when AI comes for the past? As Jacob Shapiro (Princeton University) and Chris Mattman (University of Southern California) write in The New York Times,
History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative AI that can fake current events can also fake past ones…As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.
The past shapes the present. We all know this. The authors’ discussion mostly centers on the ways in which AI could manipulate more recent history, pointing out its power to generate fraudulent documents, photos, newspaper articles, and any number of other primary source materials. However, all of history will be open to manipulation by this technology. To be sure, history has been subject to apocryphal narratives, exploitation, and propagandizing influences since the earliest periods of human history. From ancient Egyptian kings like Akhenaten (I am the sun god!) and Ramses II (I won the battle of Kadesh!) to modern nationalist movements and authoritarian governments, the past is always subject to revision or reinterpretation. There have been plenty of archaeological frauds and hoaxes, too—for just a sampling, check out Archaeology Magazine’s list. But with AI we are now entering the era of an open-access technological innovation, trained on the vast amounts of digitally recorded human data and improving at mind-blowing exponential rates, with the ability to manufacture historical disinformation at scale. The possibilities are sobering—just imagine what the Ancient Aliens dude-bro crowd will do with this kind of technology.
There is no doubt that generative AI will be one of the most transformative technologies in human history, with the potential to provide amazing benefits and technological progress. It has already proven to be a powerful tool for historians and archaeologists, assisting philologists in interpreting cuneiform texts, making the charred remains of papyrus rolls from Herculaneum readable, and experimentation in historical theory. AI is a tool that has the potential to illuminate history in a multitude of ways that researchers are only beginning to explore—but it also has the potential to be one of the most socially and politically disruptive technologies we’ve seen. As French philosopher Paul Virilio wrote,
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. (Politics of the Very Worst, New York: Semiotext(e), 1999, p. 89.)
We’ve previously discussed the complexities of how history is written and interpreted on Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, and how historical narratives are inevitably a product of the zeitgeist in which they are written. The future of history, it seems, is only going to get more complicated.
What else were we reading this week?
Arthritis was plaguing the people of ancient Egypt
Death Masks from Ancient Egypt Find an Afterlife
AI helps scholars read scroll buried when Vesuvius erupted in AD79
Striking gold: 2022 was a record year for treasure and antiquities finds, with more than 50,000 items reported
Who wants to be the next British Museum director? Post advertised with a salary of £216,000
Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules
An Ancient Tomb Revealed a Potent Surprise: 17th Century Bones Contained THC
The Politics of Archaeology: Palestine as a Capsule Case Study
Art Bites: Surrealist Painter René Magritte Was a Master Forger, Too
Ancient Lipstick Dating Back More Than Three Millennia Is Found in Iran
“Which Feminist Greek Myth Retelling Should I Read?”
One more thing…
A new novel by Egyptologist and friend of the podcast Malayna Evans is out now. Neferura is a story of female power told from the perspective of Hatshepsut’s daughter, who finds herself caught in a high-stakes power struggle between two kings. Check it out!