Hey followers! Today, let’s dive into a fascinating effort to safeguard human creativity from the AI wave.

Scientists, after nuclear tests in the mid-20th century, sought pure steel called “low-background steel,” free from radiation contamination. Now, in our digital age, there’s a new kind of preservation — collecting pre-AI content that predates the explosive rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

John Graham-Cumming, a seasoned software engineer, launched a website called lowbackgroundsteel.ai, treating pre-AI human-made content as a precious artifact — a time capsule of organic human expression created before machines joined the conversation.

This project aims to protect sources of true human creativity, from old books and photos to historical videos, before AI contamination makes such media hard to verify. Think of it as a digital archaeology, marking the line between human and hybrid media, helping future generations understand how we communicated before AI took over.

Graham-Cumming’s site features archives like a 2022 Wikipedia dump, public domain books, the Library of Congress archive, and open source code from GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault, all untouched by AI. It also invites users to contribute other pre-AI content to preserve our digital history.

While the project isn’t against AI itself, it emphasizes safeguarding the purity of human expression for historical clarity. Like the original low-background steel, which became scarce after atmospheric testing, this digital collection stands as a reminder of our past human ingenuity, free from artificial contamination.

In a time where distinguishing human from machine output becomes tricky, these archives might be invaluable. They serve as a record of simple, authentic human creativity from a time before AI dramatically reshaped our digital landscape.