Project Timestamper

Assuring the integrity of humanity's cultural and scientific heritage.

[Quite Interesting @qikipedia]

2,000 years ago there may have been as many as 75,000 living languages. Today there are only around 7,000.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

So if you love music, or culture, or science and you want to help us with timestamping, please reach out!
9/9

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

We are thrilled to share our Good News in the world of music, musicology, musicianship, and music appreciation!

At Project Timestamper, we have just completed an effort to preserve the authenticity of human recorded music.
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[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

We ourselves aren’t storing any content: we are focusing narrowly on archiving the timestamp proofs, just as we have done for millions of books, films, paintings, and research papers that exist today in digital form somewhere on the Internet.
8/

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

@StuckInBootloop Still alive! :)

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

We're very pleased to introduce Project Timestamper, an open-source initiative to protect humanity's cultural and scientific heritage from AI forgery.

https://t.co/e4vaZt0f0g

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

@eu_kazuma No problem! We really appreciate the questions and your kind words.

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

@eu_kazuma At the moment we're focused on large collections wherever possible. But we also would like to make it easier for people to timestamp content and publish the timestamps -- hoping to work on this as time allows. 🙂

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

@eu_kazuma Did you have any kind of support in mind?

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

@eu_kazuma At this point, we don't have plans to make a .onion site. While it would be nice to have that, we are focused on finding ways to serve the website with zero maintenance so the timestamps stay online after we are gone. 🙂

[kkz-apenas um liberatório @kkaazzumes]

Acho muito importante esse tipo de projeto que tenta al máximo preservar nossa história e cultura

[Project Timestamper @projtimestamper]

@punk6529 That's why we are building Project Timestamper. Only decentralized, cryptographically-secure timestamps can preserve the integrity of the historical record of human culture and science.

https://t.co/e4vaZt0f0g

[6529 @punk6529]

every single non-decentralized, non-cryptographically based system will not survive ASI