Patrick J. Burns

Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects @ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World / NYU | Formerly Culture Cognition, and Coevolution Lab (Harvard) & Quantitative Criticism Lab (UT-Austin) | Fordham PhD, Classics | LatinCy developer

Is Agentic Philology an Oxymoron? Some Thoughts on Error, Control, and Disciplinary Definition

Abstract for talk at AI & the Study of Antiquity, Rutgers University Classics Department. New Brunswick, NJ.

Abstract

In this talk, I look at the Latin text content found in large language model (LLM) training data repositories and specifically the high rates of corrupted text resulting from decades of OCR errors and other scanning artifacts. I argue here that the extent of the corruption—measured in the billions of errors—is beyond human scale, perhaps even testing the limits of smaller model-based correction approaches, and that we should therefore consider the possibility of an “agentic philology.” That is, we should look at the possibility of using AI agents to perform computational-scale text critical work on these collections in such a way that we take advantage of what Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (2021, p. 3) have defined as the five defining characteristics of agents, namely the ability to “operate autonomously, perceive their environment, persist over a prolonged period of time, adapt to change, and create and pursue goals.” I discuss the ways in which such human-out-of-the-loop approaches do not easily align with existing philological expectations of authority and control in the face of error and call for more critical discussion of novel agentic methods in the face of computational-scale error correction challenges.

References

• Russell, S. and Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th ed.). Pearson.