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A couple of things

Nothing astounding jumped out to capture my attention as I browsed the news wires today so let's look at a couple of issues that have been boiling away for a while.

First up, the future of the history of the internet.

By this I mean that we should be increasingly worried that the history of our electronic media is not secure and could leave historians with some worrying gaps when they look back at how this medium evolved and grew in past decades.

Although we have The Wayback Machine operating at http://web.archive.org/, the efficacy and completeness of this service is under challenge from a number of directions.

Last year it was ruled that The Internet Archive had breached copyright by digitising a vast number of books and operating a digital "lending library" of those titles.

An attempt to appeal this ruling has failed and there are concerns in some quarters that the costs of these legal engagements may threaten the good work that the Internet Archive is doing in other areas.

To be honest, I'm a great fan of digitising libraries and creating the virtual equivalent of this concept using ebooks. However, based on what I've read, it seems that the Internet Archive's version was a lot more akin to piracy than a traditional library.

Libraries based on the lending of physical books automaticaly have a limitation that any individual book can only be lent to one person at a time. In the case of the Internet Archive's operation it is alleged that they were lending multiple copies to multiple people simultaneously -- something that would certainly appear to violate the rights of the copyright owners.

Let's hope that this doesn't have an unwanted flow-on effect that could adversely affect the massive trove of archived webpages they've amassed over the decades -- although in the case of those archives I believe that fair use applies.

The next topic for today is AI and the fact that experts have issued more warnings about the safety of AI.

Just as George Orwell's novel 1984 seems to have become a prophesy fulfilled in the third decade of the 21st century, we have to wonder if the Terminator movies may be yet another case of fiction becoming fact in a few short years' time, if AI continues to be rolled out without any kind of precautions.

Concerns should perhaps be further raised as the creators of ChatGPT seem to be working very hard to hide the workings of the latest "o1" version of the system which, they claim, uses "reasoning" as part of its new model.

Linking these two stories is the worry that huge swathes of crappy content, created by AI systems, could well overwhelm and distort the contents of The Internet Archive, significantly reducing its value as a record of mankind's views of the world, as echoed on the internet.

If 90 percent of future content is created by AI bots and that content isn't clearly labeled as AI-generated, generations looking back at the world through the archive will likely get a very deceptive view of the world in which we live today.

Carpe Diem folks!

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