BERNAMA/DPA – Linda from an address in Reading in England cast her message in a bottle into the waters of the Thames or the North Sea in 2007, for it to be found on the German holiday island of Sylt in 2018 in an indecipherable state, reported German Press Agency (dpa).

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools have now allowed parts of the letter to be decoded, but Linda, who had asked for a response from the finder, is now nowhere to be found.

Malte Bayer and his family from Germany’s Black Forest region found the bottle, and the letter decorated with colourful fish, seahorses, a boat and life buoys, while walking along the beach.

“I was able to read – England and a city,” he said. The find then lay in a basket with shells as a holiday memento. Bayer’s wife drew his attention to it more recently, and as he is engaged in AI work, he decided to have another attempt.

Based on his awareness that AI can decipher hieroglyphs, he deciphered the words: “Whoever finds this, please write to me,” along with the address: 5 Roslyn Crescent, Reading, England.

The company currently at the address has no knowledge of Linda, who is thought to have been in her early teens at the time she wrote the message, according to the analysis.

AI expert Michael Hanisch said that scanning and analysis could make old texts legible again. New Large Language Models (LLM) are better at establishing contexts than old models, seeing texts and images as a single element.

The new models are also able to fill in missing passages, he says. “When AI has once seen a message in a bottle or something similar, it can deduce things from there,” he said. This includes text and addresses.

-- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin