Feeding our books into generative AI risks creating a cultural void
When we put our literature, games and films into AI models, we risk replacing our cultural history with a mishmash of auto-generated works. We desperately need to preserve human writing, says columnist Annalee Newitz
In the year 800, a group of students gathered for a graduate seminar focused on an era known as the Void Ages. They had read a few books and watched low-resolution media referred to as "movies". A few students managed to create devices to experience "video games" – interactive stories focused on accumulating digital representations of value – using original controllers.
As the professor explained the psychology behind why game controllers resembled fists with nipples, a student asked why there were so few preserved artifacts from this era. The professor dismissed war or global wildfire as the cause, pointing to a time map and explaining that it was the people of that era who fed their culture into large language models and discarded the original texts.
The result, the professor stated, is that all we have left is the output of ancient algorithms. The students were left to question if the material they were studying was truly what people knew or saw in the past, or if it was generated by LLMs. This raises concerns about losing our cultural history and connections to each other, as we risk replacing it with generated content that offers nothing to future generations.
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