I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma.
I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.)
Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared.
I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee.
I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (http://projects.dev) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: http://bookofkells.vercel.app.
I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity.
The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future.
I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat.
So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.
