I find this incredibly exciting. There could be some truly remarkable works whose contents are about to be revealed, and we don’t really know what we might find. Histories of the ancient (more ancient) world. Accounts of contact with cultures and civilizations that are currently lost to history. Scientific and mathematical discoveries. And what I often find to be the most moving: stories of daily life that illuminate what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago.
Which becomes a real gotcha when it turns out to be hallucinated 'content' misleading people into following their assumptions on what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago.
What we call AI does have superhuman powers but they are not powers of insight, they are powers of generalization. AI is more capable than a human is of homogenizing experience down to what a current snapshot of 'human thought' would be, because it's by definition PEOPLE rather than 'person'. The effort to invoke a specific perspective from it (that seems ubiquitous) sees AI at its worst. This idea that you could use it to correctly extract a specific perspective from the long dead, is wildly, wildly misguided.
