Hoarding Pre-AI Content
July 27th, 2025Via: Ars Technica:
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.
The archive name comes from a scientific phenomenon from the Cold War era. After nuclear weapons testing began in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated new steel production worldwide. For decades, scientists needing radiation-free metal for sensitive instruments had to salvage steel from pre-war shipwrecks. Scientists called this steel “low-background steel.” Graham-Cumming sees a parallel with today’s web, where AI-generated content increasingly mingles with human-created material and contaminates it.
With the advent of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion in 2022, it has become far more difficult for researchers to ensure that media found on the Internet was created by humans without using AI tools. ChatGPT in particular triggered an avalanche of AI-generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely.
I don’t know if you’ve been seeing the articles Down Under, but some are appearing online that say judges are using AI to write court decisions. Trouble is, the AI makes up things, like earlier decisions in similar cases, and uses its inventions to justify the current decision. I guess they need to be fact-checked, too.
I hope this guy’s project succeeds.
Fascinating. Even the “low-background steel” metaphor.
Brian Roemmele is big on training his personal AI using pre-internet materials — media from a more positive and hopeful age.