400-Year-Old Play’s Anonymous Spanish Author Finally Gets A Name After AI Scans

Artificial intelligence has thus been a handy tool in various tech and medicine sectors, but it can sometimes be a bit dubious when used in the arts. However, instead of generating work, some professionals may have found a better use of the technology in identifying lost work.

An old play from Spain which was estimated to be written over 400 years ago has long been attributed to an anonymous author. Now, with an AI system, the identity of this elusive writer may have just come to light.

 
Per The Guardian, the lead professors of the project sent the work through a system matching the piece to texts from the same era. The play La francesca Laura (The Frenchwoman Laura) was compared against 100 of these pieces, almost all belonging to the playwright, sailor, and priest Lope de Vega.
 
La francesca Laura tells a tale of an innocent woman who is nearly sacrificed in exchange for her husband’s honor. However, unlike many stories that came out during the Spanish Golden Age, the woman manages to escape, resulting in a third act with a happy ending.
 
The play was first identified in 2017 by Germán Vega from the University of Valladolid and Álvaro Cuéllar from the University of Vienna. Both had come together to launch a project known as Etso, which uses AI to establish misattributed works from the Golden Age.
 
In order to train the system, Vega and Cuéllar fed 1,300 transcribed works through a platform called Transkribus. A separate program called Stylo could then match these pieces of lost work against Etso’s database of 2,800 tales from 350 authors.
 
When identifying La francesca Laura, the model picked out plot lengths, expressions, character names, and unique writing styles before deduced that it matched Lope’s later work.
 
Vega posits that researchers could use such a database to identify even more pieces of writing that have lost their author over time. So while using AI to generate art might not be the best call right now, it could definitely benefit researchers in the field.
 
 
 
[via PC Mag and The Guardian, Photo 19300313 © Vladimir Voronin | Dreamstime.com]