I feel like this post is going to sound like one of the most grumpy old man posts I’ve ever written on this blog, and that’s saying something.

But dammit, it’s necessary.

As a child who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and had more than a passing interest in journalism, it saddens me to see where not just journalism—but content as a whole—is today. I was a photojournalist for my high school newspaper and contributed writing to it and to our school yearbook. Journalism was also my first declared major, before I meandered back to education as is the tendency in my family.

I’d like to point out that it makes me feel dirty to use the phrase “content”. But that’s the reality of where we are now. When I was a boy—hell, when I was in my 20s—publishing something meant it went through a process. Most of the people who wrote then wanted to write for a living. That was literally their job. Authors. Journalists. Photojournalists. Local newspaper reporters. Hell, there was still even a concept of local newspapers, something that is effectively dead today.

If you’re under the age of 20 today, you probably don’t know that newspapers used to be real. They used to be researched. They used to be crafted. There was an art to news gathering, to journalism, to any sort of publishing for print.

And as a consumer of news, pretty much anybody on this planet at that time could consider their local newspaper, news channel, their favorite magazine, their encyclopedia, their dictionary to not just be well authored, but in the majority of cases, all would be well intentioned.

When I graduated in 1995 with my B.A. in Psychology, journalism felt like it still had a pretty decent future ahead of it. In fact, I think a lot of people thought it had a bright future ahead of it, given the resonance the young Web was already causing.

But one important thing happened.

The dam broke.

With the broader availability of, access to, and reliance on the Internet, leading to the World Wide Web as a whole, we shifted into a world where “publishing” content didn’t require access to writers, editors, massive printing facilities… or even shipping and fulfillment systems.

Overall, the Web gradually neutralized the need for the massive machine that we had built up for journalism over the previous several hundred years.

With the address of the web and HTML, we arrived at this place where any schmuck with a web browser can be “a journalist”.

There is a certain lore around something called “low background steel“. (Stick with me for a minute here, it’ll all make sense eventually.) Let me give you a little, well, background on low background steel, and explain why the hell I’m bringing up steel in a post talking about journalism and content as a whole.

When the atomic age arrived in 1945, and we began openly irradiating the planet to any degree, we forever changed things. It was a bit of a butterfly effect where the radiation produced by man’s fuckery with atomic energy—particularly nuclear testing in the open—resulted in, for lack of a better term, contamination of all future steel that would be produced.

Imagine you wanted to build something like a Geiger counter, built within a steel case. Well, you can’t exactly use steel that has radiation in it. You need steel that is free of… well… atomic fuckery.

As a result, there is a market for what is called low-background steel. It is said that there is a global phenomenon where privateers will dive to shipwrecks that occurred pre-1945. These shipwrecks, which are typically respected as gravesites, are then strip-mined of their steel, which contains no atomic fuckery. This low-background steel can then be used for any purpose where you need something that does not have any level of radiation tainting it. (As I understand it, with the low level of nuclear testing that we’ve been doing in the last several decades, the market for low background steel is mellowing out… Because basically you can produce clean enough steel now free of two significant of contamination.)

So why am I bringing up steel in this post? Because in the 1990s, with the arrival of the web, and the ability for anyone to publish contact to the web, we forever tainted the state of content. Or more precisely, we introduced atomic fuckery into journalism.

I have to be careful here because almost all of my career has been based around this Web-based fuckery. But I’ve also tried really hard to make sure that what I write, what I publish, what I edit, my content contributions to the world, are done mindfully.

But as a whole, if we look back over the last 30 years, we’ve effectively got 30 years gradually leading to the decline of journalism, and the declining value of content as a whole.

It’s incredibly challenging today to make a living as a journalist, a photojournalist, and honestly, a good author. Because the cost of publishing anything has been driven so close to zero, we as a society have effectively devalued truth in media. And if you look around us, it’s not hard to see. Frankly, the majority of news media today is the worst quality, least trustworthy, and most unreliable it’s ever been.

Which brings me to today.

Last week as I was running through my RSS feed (yes, I still have an RSS feed!) I ran across a strange article from 404 Media, one of several sites I actually pay for content on. This article was interesting to me because it talked about the fact that some AI-related organizations are apparently increasingly looking for caches of pre-2022 content.

Why, you might ask?

In essence, they’re looking for low-background content. They’re looking for journalism. They’re looking for something that is not tainted with AI fuckery, which effectively began in 2022. Much like the timeline I mentioned above between say 1995 and now, the last four years in particular have introduced us to an era where it is becoming increasingly difficult to look at any piece of text or visual media and trust it.

It’s increasingly difficult to tell what media has ever been touched by the invisible hand of AI. And this becomes increasingly important as we look at the future. Not just for future generations, but for present day humans. If you don’t know that the book you’re reading the magazine you’re reading, the Wikipedia entry you’re reading, the “news “site that you’re reading each contain content that was sourced from AI to some degree, you cannot inherently trust it.

This might sound like hyperbole, but I don’t think it is.

In fact, I think it’s kind of funny to look back at how much bluster there was around the “blockchain“ and the level of trust it would add to things, and how much Silicon Valley even bloviated about the value of that chain of trust, and where we are today with AI.

Over the next several decades it is going to become difficult—and potentially almost impossible—to find the truth. Without any ability to look at a piece of content and know that it didn’t get touched by AI fuckery, it effectively becomes impossible to know who to trust, what to trust, and who you should innately not believe. And in a world filled with Trumpian lies, this is a problem. It’s a serious problem.

I guess the biggest problem with this post is that I’m standing on the corner of the street, pointing at a giant steaming pile of shit, and I don’t have a solution to clean it up. I’m just telling you that it stinks.

For me, personally, the most important thing I can do, and the thing that I will continue to do, is not… use… AI.

Because of the Web and the ease of generating and posting countless forms of content, AI results in this incredible cascade of AI fuckery by-catch. And if someone who earnestly yearns for a world where you can trust the books you read, trust the magazines you read, trust the news sites you read, and even just trust the photos and videos that you see in your daily life, AI is effectively an existential threat to the truth. And as someone who distinctly tries to value the truth—and tries to ensure that what he creates, and what he shares, is reliable and trustworthy—I must not play a part in the AI fuckery.

And honestly, if you value the truth, and you value journalism, good writing, and good media, you’ll do the same.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to push back against AI as vendors insist on jamming it into everything to try and establish their AI fuckery beachhead. However, I feel like the bottom is finally beginning to fall out of the bullshit windstorm of AI.

But in the meantime, I’ll just be sitting here doing my best to create and share the truth.