I was thinking, and normally I would be debating some article that comes out and this time this was organic thought… Are we losing our history to AI?

I think we will, with all the generative content out there some infection of false material will become fact unfortunately. There are channels out there that are making battle reenactment and they may not pay attention to a small piece of information that gets slipped in. Down the road researchers take that small piece of information as fact. we live in a world that allows history to become transformative in the moment

Anyone can go on to wikipedia and change an article to change history in a moment.. We don’t have the hardbound check points in history anymore like the big encyclopedias anymore. We do not have the ominous set of books on our home bookshelves anymore that was the mainstay of book reports, Papers on subjects anymore. We just google…. and that is a can of worms. We can look at politics and how random things become “fact” and stick with humans no matter how many times its disproven.

The factor is that our last point in Recorded history will come down to the DVD sets of encyclopedias that were a frozen point in time. Rather this snapshot will tell us exactly what was going on to that point. Rather than the liquid historical platforms that can change in a moments notice.

Today’s AI slop might become tomorrow’s history, and that is a dangerous thing. A person wanting to profit releases tons of videos on youtube about history and does not check the content and now General Okafor of the battleship quantum now is a part of history. (if you pick up on this one give yourself a point!) So the real Aris Thorne and Lena Petrova’s of history will be blended out by fictional people that never existed.

LLM’s love injecting random names that are not really random into generative content. So at this point when these names come up we have to now question their reality. This is why some small change can infect the real history of the past and in the future change the context of the whole history. I think wikipedia should release a text version by year that is a frozen point of history, than a year later show changes to the history rather than finding the history of the document and doing a compair from there. That way at the end of the year review the many editors can research and make sure the historical value of the document stays correct.

To which end… at this point it might be a point to go to a thrift store and buy a set of encyclopedias or order yourself a 2010 DVD of Encyclopedia Britannica. Otherwise the history you thought you knew in 5 or 10 years might be changed to a degree you never knew or the thing you did was now a falsehood even though you were there at that exact spot in history.