Authorities in New York have been accused by leading academics in France and Britain of repatriating fake Roman artefacts to Lebanon.

Eight out of nine mosaic panels that the US authorities recently returned to the Middle Eastern country are not what they seem, according to claims made by Djamila Fellague of the University of Grenoble.

She claims to have uncovered proof that forgers had copied designs from original mosaics in archaeological sites or museums in Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria and Turkey. “Eight of the nine ‘returned’ mosaic panels were fakes that [are] relatively easy to detect because the models used are famous mosaics,” says Fellague.

  • Ranvier
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    8 months ago

    It was a loaded headline meant to trick people into clicking. If you just read the headline you’d think the United States government was stealing artifacts, forging them, and sending the forgeries back or something. Which has like nothing in common with the actual story in the article. Always pretty easy in the comments to tell who actually read the article and who made up an imaginary article in their head based on the headline.

    • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      I know titles are fake as shit. I read the post summary and the autotldr summary both didn’t contain anything explaining about any of what you said. Both actually renforce the idea that the antiques where sent as knowingly as fake.

      • jadero@mander.xyz
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        8 months ago

        I sympathize. I’ve been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.

        I don’t know if it’s real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.

        Now that I’ve written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being “high information” and garbage articles as “low information”, summarizing will always be more likely to cause important “damage” the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.

        • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          Not only are good and compact articles few and far between. The problem is that nowadays, a lot of the article you click on will have a paywall so reading them is impossible ( unless using barley functioning services that claim to remove it) After a while, you expect the article to be paywalled and either move on or comment based on the provided info.

          • jadero@mander.xyz
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            8 months ago

            That, too! I’ve taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a “proper” title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I’ll go read the article.

            • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              8 months ago

              It only happened with me once in lemmy and it contained the same amount of info but in a wordier version. I usually read the autotldr bot summary and if it’s not there I check the article but even then there’s a 50/50 chance it’s locked.

      • Ranvier
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        8 months ago

        Those auto tldr summaries can be super random and misleading too regardless. The auto tldr summary doesn’t imply anything like this either. It’s just a section of the article with an expert making fun of whatever expert the DA hired who missed that it was a forgery and thought it was authentic. So it’s embarrassing because they told this country, he we recovered your priceless artifact and threw the guy in jail who smuggled it. And the country is like, oh well that’s nice but the artifact was never missing in the first place. If you want to comment on something at least read the article first, or you’ll just be spreading misleading clickbait headlines even more.

        • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          I reckon I made a mistake here. I usually read the article but since what feels like almost 1 of 3 of shared articles here are locked behind paywalls I don’t bother anymore.