I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.
The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed:
> The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate.
They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive.
It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.
I don't necessarily agree with her conclusion because she wasn't participating directly in the thread and wasn't completely responsive to some of the points raised, but still, it appears that there are a few instances of difficult-to-read handwriting where OCR is still coming in second to skilled human interpretation.
Text that is _intentionally constructed_ to fool computers but not humans is obviously out of scope. But they’re generally easily solved with OCR these days anyway.
Not being rude was also an option, one you chose not to take for some reason. Seriously, all it would've taken was for you to say something like "there have been a lot of advancements so it's probably different than you remember". This conversation would've gone much smoother for you if you had.
And BugsJustFindMe can't downvote you, because it was a reply to him. So don't bite his head off over it. You got downvoted because you were a jerk, plain and simple.
Refraining from reflexively pooh-poohing AI with uninformed and/or out-of-date opinions is also an option, but not one often exercised on HN.
It gets old not being able to carry on a discussion without squinting at grayed-out text, simply because someone pointed out that humans aren't robots and should no longer have to emulate them.
I do.
> OCR is VERY good
Uh, my experience is extremely different.