The Promise & Peril of Artificial Intelligence & Sacred Texts

Dr. Brent Seales has spent more than two decades restoring cultural and historical artifacts, such as the 1,700-year-old, charred, En-Gedi Scroll (above), which would disintegrate if touched. Dr. Seales developed a way to digitally reconstruct the fragile document through a “virtual unwrapping technique,” revealing the book of Leviticus, part of the oldest Hebrew Bible ever found after the Dead Sea scrolls. His breakthrough work received international recognition and was featured in Science Advances, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Times of London, and on NOVA. He is now working with his team on the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls, among the most iconic — and inaccessible — of the world’s damaged manuscripts. These scrolls look like lumps of coal and were found in a grand villa thought to be owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 buried Herculaneum and all its treasures in gas and volcanic mud. The emerging work on these scrolls is the subject of this Nature article, as well as this New York Times story.

Upper House is delighted to welcome Dr. Seales back to UW-Madison to learn how he is applying methods inspired by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to rescue and reveal long-hidden, ancient texts. He will address the current state-of-the-art in making lost texts unlost, the renaissance unfolding in the fields of papyrology and the classics, as well as implications for biblical manuscript studies. He will also discuss the potential pitfalls of AI-based methods, which have the power to interpolate, postulate, and even invent very plausible results that are completely false. Join us for an evening with Dr. Brent Seales, as we consider the exciting possibilities AI methods offer for rescuing and redeeming hidden ancient texts, as well as the tensions and risks such methods present.