[userbinator]

The full title is "How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history", and that second part is especially fitting, although unfortunately not mentioned in the article itself, which is full of rather horrifying stories about using AI to "fill in" missing data, which is clearly not true data recovery in any meaningful sense.

I am aware of how advanced algorithms such as those used for flash memory today can "recover" data from imperfect probability distributions naturally created by NAND flash operation, but there seems to a huge gap between those, which are based on well-understood information-theoretic principles, and the AI techniques described here.

[mistrial9]

related -- A Chinese woman, known by the pseudonym Zhemao, was found to have been rewriting and falsifying Russian history on Wikipedia for over a decade. She created over 200 detailed articles on the Chinese Wikipedia, which included fictitious states, battles, and aristocrats. The hoax was exposed when a Chinese novelist, Yifan, researching for a book, stumbled upon an article about the Kashin silver mine. Yifan noticed that the article contained extensive details that were not supported by other language versions of Wikipedia, including the Russian one.

Zhemao, posing as a scholar, claimed to have a Ph.D. in world history from Moscow State University and was the daughter of a Chinese diplomat based in Russia. She used machine translation to understand Russian-language sources and filled in gaps with her own imagination. Her articles were well-crafted and included detailed references, making them appear credible. However, many of the sources cited were either fake or did not exist.

The articles were eventually investigated by Wikipedia editors who found that Zhemao had used multiple “puppet accounts” to lend credibility to her edits. Following the investigation, Zhemao was banned from Chinese Wikipedia, and her edits were deleted.