Fire, water or poison in the Library of Alexandria

If you listen to them, technicians often say that the best time to create a backup is now, because disaster is inevitable and the only question is when it will happen. That's more or less what we've learned, although we still get upset if, in an example completely invented for this column, you don't manage to recover a password and the photos from those two years where you weren't very happy but lived next to the sea with palm trees, pink sunsets and alligators and you thought that at least you would have the memory.

We rely on the Internet to store our intimate memories, but we have also delegated collective experience to it, and the Internet is fragile. If much of our life happens in its pages, how can we preserve it? “We can lose part of our memory as a society because a file format becomes obsolete,” professor Nanna Bonde Thylstrup told EL PAÍS a few months ago. According to a study published in January by the tool Ahrefs, at least 66.5% of all links created in the last nine years lead nowhere. Internet Live Stats estimated in 2019 that there were 1.7 billion websites, of which 99.9% were not active.

All you have to do is not renew a domain or stop paying for servers and the digital weeds will make their way through the ruins. There's nothing left of

The Hairpin

, which was one of the funniest and best-written publications on the internet, and is now a farm of AI-powered content. In our country,

Playground

magazine

lost its entire archive in a technological migration. In both cases, the youthful works of some of the most promising authors of the moment disappeared. This February, Google stopped storing a cacheable version of the websites it crawls. Archive.org does a good job of preserving some copies of what is published and the National Library takes care of an archive of the Spanish web, but when the daily life of a civilization happens in walled gardens, these efforts are not enough. Now, other dangers are added to the disappearance.

Researchers warn of the risk of Internet poisoning, a paradox that says that if the Internet is saturated with large volumes of inane content generated with AI, its quality will be reduced and it will no longer serve to feed future language models. This scenario is starting to become real. Amazon has limited the number of books a user can publish per day to the very human number of three.

“It's a little scary to see how AI-generated images are sneaking into Google Images. Searching for portraits from the 16th century, I have detected three and among the first results,” the art historian Alegra García wrote a few days ago. His professional colleague Montaña Hurtado responded by explaining that she had located works by Remedios Varo whose background had been enlarged with AI, which could make the non-expert think that the original painting was a cut derived from the artificial one, and not the other way around. . There are those who, to avoid these types of errors, use a filter on Google that prevents content from being displayed after 2022, that is, the emergence of ChatGPT.

It's funny: we always assumed that our great collective construction was increasingly wiser and we were more concerned with erasing our trace on the network than with preserving it. There is no need to choose a metaphor. Alexandria can burn, flood and be poisoned at the same time.

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