I find it worrying that this was upvoted so much so quickly, and HN users are apparently unable to spot the glaring red flags about this article.

1. Let's start with where the post was published. Check what kind of content this blog publishes - huge volumes of random low-effort AI-boosting posts with AI-generated images. This isn't a blog about history or linguistics.

2. The author is anonymous.

3. The contents of the post itself: it's just raw AI output. There's no expert commentary. It just mentions that unnamed experts were unable to do the job.

This isn't to say that LLMs aren't useful for science; on the contrary. See for example Terence Tao's blog. Notice how different his work is from whatever this post is.

"several experts who reviewed the page were unable to discern their meaning and thus their purpose had remained elusive"

I find this a little hard to believe.

This is literally a "my two cents' worth" answer from Gemini Pro. It's a straightforward inference from the fact that "Anno Mundi" means "in the year of the world", thus especially in the "year since creation", and that the main text references Abraham's birth with conflicting dates. It's nifty that we now have automated means of extracting a sensible scholarly consensus of "what could this possibly mean" but there's absolutely no mystery here.

I make no judgement on this particular claim, I have not checked it out.

But what immediately comes to mind from reading the title are all the "AI solutions" for the as-of-yet undecoded voynich manuscript that are posted with surprising (and increasing) frequency to at least one forum. They're all incompatible and fall apart on closer inspection.

A collection of them can be found at https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-59.html .

I think there’s something very interesting here and would be interested in hearing more about the date discrepancies- it’s a shame the article is mostly just the raw output of gemini instead of more commentary

Some data magicians unlocked the secrets of the Oculists are while back, which got me to finally dig into some occult literature and various secret societies. Hope this does the same for others.

tldr gemini asserts they are converted dates.

My colleagues do this as well with AI and it fucks me right off.

They just present the raw output, in its long form an expect everyone to follow the flow. Context is everything, damn it.

Looking into it further there isn't really a mystery as to what they are, or at least none that I could find suggesting that its unknown. Especially given the context of the page.

Its great that gemini can do this, its a shame that lots of the ancillary "analysis" about the writing doesn't appear to be correct (humanist minscule I would suggest is too new, too heathen and too Italian for a german manuscript of the time https://medievalwritings.atillo.com.au/whyread/paleographysu...)

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This is how you use AI.