I wonder if maybe the goal is to provide the actual scholars with options, approaches or translations they hadn't thought of yet. In essence just what you said, structured guessing, but if you can have a well-trained bot guess within specific bounds countless times and output the patterns in the guesses, maybe it would be enough. Not, "My AI translated this ancient fragment of text," but "My AI sent us in a direction we hadn't previously had the time or inclination to explore, which turned out to be fruitful."
I agree, but lets remember that the software repeats patterns, it doesn't so much innovate new ones. If you get too dependent on it, theoretically you might not break as much new ground, find new paradigms, discover the long-mistaken assumption in prior scholarship (that the software is repeating), etc.
Human proclivities tend toward repetition as well, partially as a memory/mnemonic device, so I don't see this as disadvantageous. For example, there's a minor opinion in biblical scholarship that John 21 was a later scribal addition because of the end of John 20 seeming to mark the end of the book itself. However, John's tendencies to use specific verbiage and structure provides a much stronger argument that the book was written by the same author—including chapter 21—suggesting that the last chapter is an epilogue.
Care needs to be taken, of course, but ancient works often followed certain patterns or linguistic choices that could be used to identify authorship. As long as this is viewed as one tool of many, there's unlikely much harm unless scholars lean too heavily on the opinions of AI analysis (which is the real risk, IMO).
> unless scholars lean too heavily on the opinions of AI analysis (which is the real risk, IMO).
This is what I was talking about. Knowledge and ideas develop often by violating the prior patterns. If your tool is (theoretically) built to repeat the prior patterns and it frames your work, you might not be as innovative. But this is all very speculative.
