Machine learning produces photorealistic portraits of Roman emperors.

Recreating ancient faces: where art meets archaeology

Artistic renderings and reconstructions of ancient people are one way to bring the past to life, providing viewers with insights into and empathy for those who came before. This article details how modern artists and archaeologists work together to...

Visualize ancient Rome in 3D with this aerial view

Researchers have compiled meticulous representations of ancient Rome in this video game-like depiction of the Eternal City from the air. For eight minutes, viewers can take in what Rome looked like two millennia ago, from the terracotta-topped homes to the Forum and Colosseum.

Ancient Romans were registered in lists of citizens to confirm their identity

Falsely claiming to be a Roman citizen was a capital offense, but taking up another identity was one way people could change their lot. Several accounts report how escaped enslaved people sought freedom by pretending to be citizens, and multiple "Neros" appeared after the real emperor died in 68 CE.

Digital re-aging and de-aging of faces in film and TV has become increasingly common

Traditional techniques for accomplishing this process were slow and labor-intensive, and often required manual frame-by-frame edits, forcing them to be reserved for "hero characters" and close-up shots. Deep learning methods used by Disney and other production companies now provide fully-automatic and production-ready methods to produce such deepfakes for entertainment purposes.

Measuring the chance a Roman emperor would die violently

The odds of survival for a Roman emperor were like playing Russian roulette with a six-chambered revolver and four bullets, according to this scientific journal article. Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire between 14 CE and 395 CE, 43 suffered a violent death. This journal article examines Roman emperors' time-to-violent death using statistical tools of survival data analysis.

The AI that creates any picture you want and how it works

Since January 2021, advances in AI research produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed yet to be released text-to-image tools, and similar models have proliferated online. This video is a primer on how we got here, how the technology works, and its implications.

Why portraits of Neanderthals vary so drastically

Neanderthals, humanity's long-lost genealogical cousins, are often portrayed as bumbling, hairy, cave-dwelling misogynists. But other efforts show tall, dignified creatures not too different from contemporary people. This article explores why most visual interpretations of Neanderthals are more in the service of social or political beliefs instead of science.

Read about a fictionalized life randomly chosen from human history.

What do you mean ancient Rome had 'Five Good Emperors?'

Between the first and second centuries CE, Rome was ruled by five emperors who reversed the civilization's sprint toward civil war. By the end of the fifth emperor's reign, the Roman Empire had achieved a level of stability and power it would never hold again. This article details the reign of the Five Good Emperors—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—who were chosen based on their abilities instead of their bloodlines.

AI-generated avatars allow users to create deepfakes in real time

Synthetic media tools can map voices and faces to make individuals appear as someone else. Although they open the door to new opportunities in immersive education and entertainment, they also raise concerns about the misuse of personal identity.

Fascinating 3D animation shows how Romans built roads

Highly efficient engineering and materials production allowed Roman administrators to lay down nearly 50,000 miles of roads across the ancient empire. These roads were built so effectively that many are still around today. Watch this quick 3-minute video to see how they did it.

Nero's 'Golden House' was the peak of Roman imperial architecture

Constructed on land cleared by the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE, Emperor Nero's large "Golden House" included gilded rooms, multiple gardens, zoo-like enclosures, an artificial lake that housed a boat, and a giant statue of Nero himself. The palace was destroyed after Nero's death in 68 CE.

Mark Zuckerberg has named all three of his daughters after Roman emperors

Zuckerberg studied Latin in high school and became interested in ancient Rome. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, went to Rome on their honeymoon. His daughters—August, Maxima, and Aurelia—are all named after Roman emperors.

See haunting images of the plaster casts of Pompeii’s victims

The plaster casts preserve victims’ final moments in striking detail—from their poses to the expressions frozen on their faces. This piece explains how 19th-century archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli devised the method long after the bodies had decomposed.

Once limited to expert studios, automated tools can create convincing deepfakes

Although the best deepfakes are engineered using generative adversarial networks where systems compete to create and assess fake data until the two cannot be distinguished, simpler tools have allowed nonexperts to develop deepfakes for financial scams, political deception, and nonconsensual pornography.

Malicious use of deepfakes can be found in scams, misinformation, and disinformation

Artificial neural networks can identify an individual's physical characteristics when provided with training data, such as real footage of the person speaking. Graphics techniques overlay these with matching characteristics from another real or generated person to create novel footage of things that have never taken place in reality.

Emperor Commodus fought as a gladiator while ruling Rome

Commodus, who reigned from 180–192 CE, scandalized Rome’s elite by appearing in the arena despite being the son of Marcus Aurelius. The ancient biography—though partly fictional—captures the shock his gladiatorial performances provoked.

Visualizing Byzantium in the year 1200

This is a computer reconstruction of the Byzantine capital at its apogee, just before the Fourth Crusade. Alongside detailed renderings of the Hippodrome and Hagia Sophia, it includes dozens of the imperial city’s less famous monuments, many of which can still be found in modern Istanbul. The reconstruction is a work in progress, and the Byzantium 1200 X account routinely posts updates.

Some of the oldest photographs in the world

Scholar and artist Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey ventured around the Mediterranean with some of the earliest photographic equipment in tow. He captured hundreds of images during his tour of Rome, Venice, Cairo, and more, in what would become...

Deepfakes images can be identified by visual elements that do not match real-world phenomena, including asymmetric eyes or earrings, surreal backgrounds, and indecipherable background text.

Raphael's Renaissance masterpiece 'The School of Athens' visually contrasts the views of philosophers Plato and Aristotle.

In 2015, a custom virus program was used to destroy and transform art images

At the Art Laboratory Berlin's "bOdy pandemOnium: Immersion into Noise" exhibit, Chicago-born artist Joseph Nechvatal explored viractualism—the interface between the biological and the technological—via a custom virus program that randomly altered images representing the human eye and rectum.

An artist used forensic techniques to recreate Jane Austen's face

For over two centuries, there was only one accepted portrait of the writer—an 1810 sketch done by Cassandra Austen, Jane's sister. Artist Melissa Dring used that as a basis for her waxwork of the author, along with eyewitness accounts from people who'd met the writer.

Take a quiz to identify whether you can spot deepfakes

Advances in artificial intelligence have made deepfakes increasingly difficult to identify, as they are intentionally designed to appear real. The technology has exacerbated some of the problems brought on by digital editing tools like Photoshop.

Scientists used mass spectrometry to determine the materials in a 1690 painting

Previously used to map the distribution of molecules on biological tissue samples, researchers combined the technique with machine learning to uncover six layers of pigments, binders, and a thin gold leaf layer within *The Marriage of the Virgin*, from a collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The technique may help identify and track artists' material use to learn about pieces of unknown provenance. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

See a collection of ancient Roman coins used on the Silk Roads

As ancient Rome's appetite for eastern luxuries grew, long-distance trade routes linking the Mediterranean to Asia emerged along what became known as the Silk Road. Without shared language or legal systems, merchants could use the reliable Roman coins to exchange with other cultures. This exhibit features gold and silver pieces bearing the portraits of emperors and Latin inscriptions.

The basis for AI image and video generation was first introduced in 2014

Through generative adversarial networks, the generator (a neural network that creates fictional data) competes against the discriminator (a neural network that assesses the data) to continuously train the former until it can make content indistinguishable from the real thing. Training with unstructured data can enable software to identify characteristics of gender, age, and expression.

Anthropic's interpretability team discusses how AI models' thinking mimics biology

Just as humans engage in complex behaviors to survive and reproduce, teams of experts in neuroscience, virology, mathematics, and other disciplines argue that large language models develop complex mechanisms to achieve their goals. These mechanisms can be manipulated to assess how they modify outputs—much like stimulating individual neurons—to uncover how LLMs "think."

See how faces on magazine covers have changed over time

This piece examined an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on 327,322 faces from the archive. Read what the researchers learned.

Super recognizers may use specific facial features to commit faces to memory

Researchers believe that recognizing individuals seen only in passing, even decades later, is an ability of genetic origin and specific to facial recognition, rather than a result of better overall memory or perception. Applying eye tracking data from super recognizers to AI has led to improvements in facial recognition software.

Explore a database of ancient graffiti

Take a look at thousands of pieces of graffiti from the walls of Herculaneum and Pompeii, including name tags, crude jokes, and crude drawings. The database, maintained by classical scholars, allows you to explore maps of the cities and images of the original inscriptions.

Bad Ancient: a site to fact-check claims about the ancient world

Peruse popular questions about ancient Rome, Egypt, Greece, and more, from whether Greek boxers were ripped or to what extent Alexander the Great conquered the world.

Explore a gallery of DALL-E creations

OpenAI's text-to-image generator can create content in a wide range of image styles based on simple prompts. Its utility has also given rise to an organic, passionate user base who employ the tool both for fun and for professional purposes.

A reading of ancient Rome's best graffiti

Graffiti has been surprisingly common throughout history, and even the grandeur of ancient Rome's walls wasn't spared. This clever and funny video reads through some of the more notable messages relayed via graffiti in ancient Rome, from tidbits of wisdom like "A small problem gets larger if you ignore it" to more unsavory observations of lovers, friends, and enemies.

Explore the archaeological treasures of Pompeii

Excavations revealed stunning finds—a wooden bed, a horse's saddle, and vivid frescoes—while also suggesting the eruption may have occurred in October, not April. See the discoveries from the EU's $140M Great Pompeii Project.

Medical professionals have experimented with using mixed reality headsets

Devices like the Apple Vision Pro have helped doctors develop surgical plans for hip and knee replacements using software that provides 3D models and other tools. Virtual screens displayed by mixed reality devices can provide information related to surgical progress, a patient's vitals, and more.

See the news with AI-generated data visualizations

Realtime uses generative AI to create immediate data visualizations of news items on its regularly-updated feed, pulling from public data feeds. Peruse stories around sports, economics, politics, and more with the helpful aid of charts and graphs. See the shape of the news with this clever AI tool here.

Chat with famous, historical, and fantasy figures with this chatbot

Character.ai—a generative AI-based chatbot platform—allows you to have free-flowing conversations with a wide range of people. From celebrities to famous figures from the past, the platform relies on a neural language model to process huge amounts of text, learning from conversations with users to develop responses. A number of observers have referred to the platform as "making AI fun," with user time on site surpassing a whopping two hours per day.

Florence as it was: a digital reconstruction of a medieval city

Florence, Italy, is widely considered the birthplace of the Renaissance in Europe, where artists, poets, architects, and entrepreneurs renewed interest in ancient cultural forms. Using data from primary works, researchers have created a digital reconstruction of the city where users can explore buildings, artworks, and more.

See the early concept art for 'Star Wars'

George Lucas asked artist Ralph McQuarrie to create reference images to help prospective producers understand his vision for the "Star Wars" universe, and drafted early versions of Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and other characters. You can check out a gallery featuring dozens of the images below.

Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were likely colorful, not white

Archaeologists stumbling upon statues from ancient Greece often found weathered creatures, their faces and figures marred by age and conflict. But evidence of polychromy—painting sculptures with color—has continued to mount.

The 18th-century French painter of goofy selfies

Long before smartphones existed, French artist Joseph Ducreux was posing for effect in his self-portraits. A minor aristocrat during the French Revolution, Ducreux depicted himself with unusual expressions, forgoing the typical staid pose for effusive ones. This article collects those paintings and tells the painter's story and his unlikely resurgence through online memes.

An AI-built pixel map reimagines New York City as a video game

Isometric NYC is a zoomable pixel-art map that renders the city in game-style perspective (think SimCity), helpfully clarifying the dense geography and architecture. The makers built the project tile-by-tile using satellite data and generative AI. Zoom into building-level views or out to see all five boroughs.

Digital twins create real-time 3D models of smart cities

These re-creations allow city planners to track changes and manage infrastructure more easily by testing strategies in virtual environments. Geospatial technologies, such as mobile mapping and satellite imaging, help cities assess urban layouts, plan for disasters, and manage resources more efficiently.

Ancient Romans helped develop modern cheese production techniques

The ancient Romans loved cheese and experimented with different processes to elevate its flavor, like aging. Some of their innovations, like Pecorino Romano, you can still find today. Others, like the smoked goat-milk Caseus, we only know about through historical records.

Deepfake potential ranges from destabilizing democracies to improving accessibility

The technology can revolutionize education, medicine, and art through actions such as helping a disabled person express themselves. However, fictional audio and video can also jeopardize a person's reputation and life or quickly spread misinformation, even without content being flawless recreations.

AI may enable smart cities to drastically improve public safety

By utilizing machine learning techniques to analyze real-time monitoring reports against facial recognition databases, artificial intelligence can enhance the identification of criminals and coordinate an appropriate emergency response across various scenarios.

Examine a 3D model of the Rosetta Stone

One of the most famous archaeological finds of all time, the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone helped unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt. Inscribed on the granite slab was the same passage in three languages: hieroglyphics, Old Egyptian, and Greek, which enabled scholars to decode the ancient language. Take an up-close look with this 3D model made up of more than 200 composite photos.

Test your ability to identify AI-generated images

This interactive project from MIT challenges users to distinguish between AI-generated images and real ones.

Self-driving formula cars race in the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League

The league and high-speed versions of traditional cars help to showcase the capabilities of driverless vehicles and the reliability of their AI systems. Leonardo da Vinci first imagined the idea for such machines in the 16th century.