A time capsule of human expression
Graham-Cumming isn’t any stranger to tech preservation efforts. He is a British software program engineer and author finest recognized for creating POPFile, an open supply e mail spam filtering program, and for efficiently petitioning the UK authorities to apologize for its persecution of codebreaker Alan Turing—an apology that Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued in 2009.
Because it seems, his pre-AI web site is not new, nevertheless it has languished unannounced till now. “I created it again in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for on-line sources that hadn’t been contaminated with AI-generated content material,” he wrote on his weblog.
The web site factors to a number of main archives of pre-AI content material, together with a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 (earlier than ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch), Venture Gutenberg’s assortment of public area books, the Library of Congress picture archive, and GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault—a snapshot of open supply code buried in a former coal mine close to the North Pole in February 2020. The wordfreq challenge seems on the checklist as nicely, flash-frozen from a time earlier than AI contamination made its methodology untenable.
The location accepts submissions of different pre-AI content material sources via its Tumblr web page. Graham-Cumming emphasizes that the challenge goals to doc human creativity from earlier than the AI period, to not make a press release in opposition to AI itself. As atmospheric nuclear testing ended and background radiation returned to pure ranges, low-background metal finally grew to become pointless for many makes use of. Whether or not pre-AI content material will observe the same trajectory stays a query.
Nonetheless, it feels affordable to guard sources of human creativity now, together with archival ones, as a result of these repositories might change into helpful in ways in which few respect in the intervening time. For instance, in 2020, I proposed making a so-called “cryptographic ark”—a timestamped archive of pre-AI media that future historians might confirm as genuine, collected earlier than my then-arbitrary cutoff date of January 1, 2022. AI slop pollutes greater than the present discourse—it might cloud the historic document as nicely.
For now, lowbackgroundsteel.ai stands as a modest catalog of human expression from what might sometime be seen because the final pre-AI period. It is a digital archaeology challenge marking the boundary between human-generated and hybrid human-AI cultures. In an age the place distinguishing between human and machine output grows more and more tough, these archives might show helpful for understanding how human communication developed earlier than AI entered the chat.
