The rise of AI-generated content since 2022 risks making it impossible to know when information was produced solely by humans, which could be a problem for both future AI and historians
By Matthew Sparkes
21 July 2025
Wikipedia already shows signs of huge AI input
Serene Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The arrival of AI chatbots marks a historical dividing line after which online material can’t be completely trusted to be human-created, but how will people look back on this change? While some are urgently working to archive “uncontaminated” data from the pre-AI era, others say it is the AI outputs themselves that we need to record, so future historians can study how chatbots have evolved.
Rajiv Pant, an entrepreneur and former chief technology officer at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, says he sees AI as a risk to information such as news stories that form part of the historical record. “I’ve been thinking about this ‘digital archaeology’ problem since ChatGPT launched, and it’s becoming more urgent every month,” says Pant. “Right now, there’s no reliable way to distinguish human-authored content from AI-generated material at scale. This isn’t just an academic problem, it’s affecting everything from journalism to legal discovery to scientific research.”
Read more
The AI expert who says artificial general intelligence is nonsense
For John Graham-Cumming at cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, information produced before the end of 2022, when ChatGPT launched, is akin to low-background steel. This metal, smelted before the Trinity nuclear bomb test on 16 July 1945, is prized for use in delicate scientific and medical instruments because it doesn’t contain faint radioactive contamination from the atomic weapon era that creates noise in readings.
Graham-Cumming has created a website called lowbackgroundsteel.ai to archive sources of data that haven’t been contaminated by AI, such as a full download of Wikipedia from August 2022. Studies have already shown that Wikipedia today shows signs of huge AI input.
“There’s a point at which we we did everything ourselves, and then at some point we started to get augmented significantly by these chat systems,” he says. “So the idea was to say – you can see it as contamination, or you can see it as a sort of a vault – you know, humans, we got to here. And then after this point, we got extra help.”