[Etheryte]

This is highly misleading. Deep learning was not what did the discovery, the find was handmade. They're trying to make a deep learning model do what was done by hand here, but so far they haven't had success in it finding actual letters.

[versteegen]

These models certainly have found letters, although mostly they produce unreadable partial letters. Look at the images from the "What’s next?" section of the article! [1] They certainly seem better than human annotation, and more importantly don't hallucinate whole letters. Casey Handmer made a submission for this First Letters prize [2] based solely on hand-annotation and wasn't awarded it, because it's really unconvincing. His letters [3] don't look at all like the computer annotations.

[1] https://scrollprize.org/img/firstletters/youssef-new.png

[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien...

[3] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/C-vKV4SdsyH961w6KPwD6rypt0...