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The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests
For artificial intelligence researchers, the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, changed the world in a way similar to the detonation of the first atomic bomb.
The Trinity test, in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, marked the beginning of the atomic age. One manifestation of that moment was the contamination of metals manufactured after that date – as airborne particulates left over from Trinity and other nuclear weapons permeated the environment.
The poisoned metals interfered with the function of sensitive medical and technical equipment. So until recently, scientists involved in the production of those devices sought metals uncontaminated by background radiation, referred to as low-background steel, low-background lead, and so on.
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Shortly after the debut of ChatGPT, academics and technologists started to wonder if the recent explosion in AI models has also created contamination.
Their concern is that AI models are being trained with synthetic data created by AI models. Subsequent generations of AI models may therefore become less and less reliable, a state known as AI model collapse.
In March 2023, John Graham-Cumming, then CTO of Cloudflare and now a board member, registered the web domain lowbackgroundsteel.ai and began posting about various sources of data compiled prior to the 2022 AI explosion, such as the Arctic Code Vault (a snapshot of GitHub repos from 02/02/2020).
The Register asked Graham-Cumming whether he came up with the low-background steel analogy, but he said he didn't recall.
"I knew about low-background steel from reading about it years ago," he responded by email. "And I’d done some machine learning stuff in the early 2000s for [automatic email classification tool] POPFile. It was an analogy that just popped into my head and I liked the idea of a repository of known human-created stuff. Hence the site."
The Trinity test, in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, marked the beginning of the atomic age. One manifestation of that moment was the contamination of metals manufactured after that date – as airborne particulates left over from Trinity and other nuclear weapons permeated the environment.
The poisoned metals interfered with the function of sensitive medical and technical equipment. So until recently, scientists involved in the production of those devices sought metals uncontaminated by background radiation, referred to as low-background steel, low-background lead, and so on.
snip
Shortly after the debut of ChatGPT, academics and technologists started to wonder if the recent explosion in AI models has also created contamination.
Their concern is that AI models are being trained with synthetic data created by AI models. Subsequent generations of AI models may therefore become less and less reliable, a state known as AI model collapse.
In March 2023, John Graham-Cumming, then CTO of Cloudflare and now a board member, registered the web domain lowbackgroundsteel.ai and began posting about various sources of data compiled prior to the 2022 AI explosion, such as the Arctic Code Vault (a snapshot of GitHub repos from 02/02/2020).
The Register asked Graham-Cumming whether he came up with the low-background steel analogy, but he said he didn't recall.
"I knew about low-background steel from reading about it years ago," he responded by email. "And I’d done some machine learning stuff in the early 2000s for [automatic email classification tool] POPFile. It was an analogy that just popped into my head and I liked the idea of a repository of known human-created stuff. Hence the site."
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/15/ai_model_collapse_pollution/?td=rt-3a