BURSTFormer 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.