“Low-Background Steel” for the Internet: A Digital Archive of Pre-AI Human Creativity

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming has launched lowbackgroundsteel.ai, a website dedicated to cataloging pre-AI human-created content—treating it like a rare, uncontaminated resource in an era increasingly flooded with machine-generated material.
Why “Low-Background Steel”?
The name draws from a Cold War-era phenomenon:
- After nuclear testing began in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated steel production.
- Scientists needing radiation-free metal for sensitive instruments salvaged pre-1945 steel from shipwrecks, dubbing it “low-background steel.”
- Graham-Cumming sees a parallel: AI-generated content now “contaminates” the web, making purely human creativity harder to find.
The Problem: AI’s Pollution of Digital Culture
ChatGPT’s 2022 debut triggered an avalanche of synthetic text, images, and video.
Research casualties:
- Wordfreq, a Python library analyzing word frequency across 40+ languages, shut down in 2024 because the web became “full of slop generated by large language models.”
“Model collapse” fears: AI training on its own outputs could degrade quality—though recent studies suggest curated synthetic + real data may mitigate this.
What’s in the Archive?
The site links to verified pre-AI (pre-2022) sources, including:
- Wikipedia dump (August 2022) – Before ChatGPT’s release.
- Project Gutenberg – Public domain books.
- Library of Congress photo archive.
- GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault – A 2020 snapshot of open-source code buried near the North Pole.
Graham-Cumming quietly launched the site in March 2023 but only recently publicized it, framing it as a “digital archaeology” project rather than an anti-AI statement.
Why Preserve Pre-AI Content?
- Historical record – Future researchers may need “clean” datasets to study human communication pre-AI.
- Cultural preservation – Like low-background steel, these archives could become rare references in an AI-saturated world.
- Combating misinformation – Timestamped archives help verify authentic human works vs. AI-generated material.
The Bigger Debate
- Will AI “contamination” matter long-term?
- Just as nuclear testing stopped and low-background steel became obsolete, AI may integrate seamlessly into culture.
- Or will unmixed human creativity become a relic?
- Graham-Cumming’s project suggests we should preserve it now before it’s irrecoverable.
Final Thought
As AI reshapes creativity, lowbackgroundsteel.ai serves as a time capsule—a boundary marker between the last purely human era and the age of human-AI collaboration.