The articles in the Canadian press are just clickbait. Their paper is https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 https://transacl.org/ojs/in

The articles in the Canadian press are just clickbait. Their paper is https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 and the claims are somewhat more modest. The language identification method they use (does it count as AI?) assumes that the Voynich Manuscript text is in a language they check for, the words of which may have been anagrammed. There is no consensus that this is the case. The Voynich Manuscript could be entirely meaningless, or encrypted using a different mechanism, or be written in a language they don't check for. They then find the closest match. The use of anagrams adds an extra degree of freedom, which makes finding spurious matches more likely. So they identified Hebrew, which is at least plausible. They then translate one line of the manuscript, using Google Translate, into English. There was no control. They should have applied their method to text known to be meaningless, and questioned their approach if meaning was found. Gordon Rugg (whom they cite) and myself (here: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/generated-voynich-manuscript.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/generated-voynich-manus... ) have generated meaningless Voynichese text. I haven't applied their entire approach, but Google Translate translates the first line of my generated manuscript, when the language is identified as Bengali, as "Do not worry about the fact that the person is very friendly".