A Role for the Machine, or, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, and Some Humans in the Loop Studying the Human Remains Trade

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human remains are traded openly across social media and the wider web. The posts that accompany these texts are sometimes graphic, often disrespectful, and normally afford no dignity to the dead. The imagery can similarly show no real respect for the dead or descendent communities. One role that computer vision or other artificial intelligence techniques can have in this situation is to do the looking, the reading, for us, to reduce the impact on the mental health of the researcher. On the other hand, this creates a certain distancing: what is the correct balance? In this paper I discuss various approaches we have used, their potentials and their perils, and discuss some of our experiments in teaching the machine to see like a bioarchaeologist, to read like a digital humanist. I conclude with some initial experiments with large language models, asking what role generative AI might have in this research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38257.0