SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/

Title    The Need for a Strategic Fact Reserve
Date    Tuesday January 21 2025, @09:39AM
Author    hubie
Topic   
from the avoiding-the-ouroboros-of-LLM-slop dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/01/21/0030206

canopic jug writes:

Blogger Matt Webb point out that nations have begun to need a strategic fact reserve, in light of the problem arising from LLMs and other AI models starting to consume and re-process the slop which they themselves have produced.

The future needs trusted, uncontaminated, complete training data.

From the point of view of national interests, each country (or each trading bloc) will need its own training data, as a reserve, and a hedge against the interests of others.

Probably the best way to start is to take a snapshot of the internet and keep it somewhere really safe. We can sift through it later; the world's data will never be more available or less contaminated than it is today. Like when GitHub stored all public code in an Arctic vault (02/02/2020): a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain. Or the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

But actually I think this is a job for librarians and archivists.

What we need is a long-term national programme to slowly, carefully accept digital data into a read-only archive. We need the expertise of librarians, archivists and museums in the careful and deliberate process of acquisition and accessioning (PDF).

(Look and if this is an excuse for governments to funnel money to the cultural sector then so much the better.)

It should start today.

Already, AI slop is filling the WWW and starting to drown out legitimate, authoritative sources through sheer volume.

Previously
(2025) Meta's AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
(2024) Thousands Turned Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing
(2024) Annoyed Redditors Tanking Google Search Results Illustrates Perils of AI Scrapers


Original Submission

Links

  1. "canopic jug" - https://soylentnews.org/~canopic+jug/
  2. "nations have begun to need a strategic fact reserve" - https://interconnected.org/home/2025/01/17/facts
  3. "slop" - https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2025/jan/08/ai-generated-slop-slowly-killing-internet-nobody-trying-to-stop-it
  4. "GitHub stored all public code in an Arctic vault" - https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
  5. "Svalbard Global Seed Vault" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
  6. "acquisition and accessioning" - https://collectionstrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Acquisition-and-accessioning.pdf
  7. "AI slop" - https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/a-dubious-contraption/
  8. "Meta's AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/01/05/1821250
  9. "Thousands Turned Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=24/11/05/1951213
  10. "Annoyed Redditors Tanking Google Search Results Illustrates Perils of AI Scrapers" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=24/10/29/0059246
  11. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=64806

© Copyright 2026 - SoylentNews, All Rights Reserved

printed from SoylentNews, The Need for a Strategic Fact Reserve on 2026-03-17 02:34:20