Forget The Future, AI Will Take Us Back To The Past

AI is the future, and it's also the past. Not just in the sense of having been developed in previous years and decades, but also in the sense of being capable of recreating human history. This power was highlighted vividly by a study published at the end of August by researchers from University College London and Duke University, who managed to use artificial intelligence to create separate representations of two images that had been painted on both sides of a single panel. More specifically, they used X-ray imaging techniques to produce a combined representation of the outer panels of the famous 15th Century Ghent Altarpiece painting. Because the resulting image was a combination of two images superimposed on each other, it was previously hard to analyze.