Pre-AI content

This ArsTechnica headline grabbed my attention: Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel, and now we’re hoarding pre-AI content:

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. “The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content,” Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI media uniquely human.

This parallel with pre-atomic bomb steel and Internet pre-Gen-AI is quite appropriate. Human content is being polluted by the AI-produced-garbage¹, and it will be hard to clean up. And we only know for certain if the content was created. Stable Diffusion was the singularity. And it has gone downhill since. I’m scared of Wikipedia being all wrong because it’s likely easier for someone to use GenAI that to do research, and hard for editors to detect: it doesn’t scale.