Artificial Intelligence and Prospects for its Use in the Study of Upper Palaeolithic Rock Art
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Sokolovska Alisa 
Published: December 2024

The problem raised in this article is that since the discovery of rock art, the scientific community has been facing many questions related to the development of rock art and its semantic basis. It is becoming more and more difficult for us to call rock paintings the product of only religious or magical ideas, how researchers of the last century thought about it, and it is obviously simply impossible to look into the minds of people who lived thousands of years ago.
The topic of cave paintings is a complex issue, for the study of which we must involve not only archaeological research methods, but also ethnographic and art historical ones. In my opinion, we should try to involve other scientific fields, in addition to those already mentioned above, and apply the latest technologies.
Until recently, the only analogies we had available to us were ethnographic comparisons of the creativity and worldviews of primitive societies, but science is not standing still. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has appeared on the scene, developing like humans, and what is interesting to us is that it is also developing in the field of fine art.
Why do we need to use artificial intelligence to analyse rock art at all? Because, as humans, we often see only what we want to see and therefore project our own worldview onto the analysis of rock art, which makes this analysis more of a psychological portrait of its author than an analysis as such. If we engage in analysis in a machine that is guided only by knowledge and has no worldview, which allows us to use a literally objective ‘opinion’ for analysis, it will not project its own worldview onto the results of the analysis, because it does not have one by definition.
The study raises the question of how we can put artificial intelligence technologies to work now and in the near future. The research methods are an analysis of the level of development of this topic in scientific research and articles by other scholars and an attempt to use such a type of analysis as a comparative analysis in relation to works created by Artificial Intelligence and works created by ancient man, which may, in the future, give us the opportunity to comprehend the images left to us by people of the Palaeolithic era.
The scientific novelty of the work lies in the proposal and attempt to use Artificial Intelligence technology as a tool for the study of Palaeolithic rock art, which has not been used before and did not go beyond assumptions.
According to the results of the study, we can trace a certain similarity between the early works of art created by Artificial Intelligence and abstract works created by ancient humans in the Paleolithic period. Of course, we cannot say that the development of human and AI art is identical, because again, they are fundamentally different. A person painted because he was inspired to do so, and a machine painted because it had a task. Nevertheless, I believe that this study, although it may seem absurd at first glance in the long run, no matter how pretentious it sounds, may be our step towards finding answers to the questions that we have not been able to find for more than a hundred years.
Key words: Archaeological studies, rock painting, artificial intelligence, Upper Palaeolithic, modern research methods.