Low Background Information will defeat the Slop Ouroboros

Talk by Martin Hamilton

Sunday from 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM in Bodgeham-on-Wye

We're in the midst of a genAI slopocalypse, as the Internet has become permeated with hallucinations from the hungry ghosts that stalk our data centres and swarm our networks. It's not surprising that a lot of people have chosen to batten down the hatches and lock down their websites to deter scrapers and the robber barons of genAI digital enclosure, but paradoxically this can make it even harder to find the quality content online. Fortunately there is a wealth of Low Background Information out there that existed before the resistible rise of the chatterbots. Laser rot notwithstanding, there are the venerable discs of the BBC Domesday Project, which crowdsourced information about the UK from around a million children at 10,000 schools in the early 1980s. We also have the likes of Project Gutenberg's curated library of post-copyright literature, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the CLOCKSS digital preservation network for research outputs, and the Kiwix project's offline version of Wikipedia. This talk will cover the epistemic challenges the Slop Ouroboros creates for the reality-based community, using the totally real and in no way made up EMF Orphan Source Village as an example. I'll also consider how we can satisfy ourselves that these data sources haven't been tampered with. And yes, we will go spelunking in the Domesday Discs to see what we can learn about a certain biennial village fete. There may also be bonus tetrapod content, however it is important to be clear that there is definitely no Tetrapod Cult.

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