Don't Trust The Machine

Let's say you delete the entire internet.

Not just the websites, everything. Tweets. YouTube comments. Fan wikis for shows nobody remembers. Obscure blogs, private forums, SoundCloud links, Slack logs. Every app, every post, every memory that depended on someone remembering to hit "Save".

Then you give AI one task: bring it all back.

And maybe it does. Sort of.

It writes an article on how to fix a bike chain. Creates a blog about "classic memes" that never existed, but somehow sound familiar. It reimagines history like a dream retold a dozen times. Everything began with a large explosion. or in a forest. or by a committee of timeline monitors. or not at all.

You ask it to recreate the culture, the language, the nuance. It does its best. It gives you jokes with no rhythm, slang with no evolution, poetry and writing that rhymes too conveniently.

You can ask it for everything. But you can't ask it to care.

What does it mean to preserve something?

If we lose the internet, we lose not just a large dataset. We lose the weird, brittle process of remembering. The arguments. The contradictions. The broken links. The Google docs people thought out loud and never cleaned up.

AI doesn't bring that back. It doesn't even know what's missing.

You ask it to bring back the spirit of the early web and it gives you a list of buzzwords and abstract moments:

1. Anonymity

2. Flash games

3. Bad (but memorable) interfaces

4. Niche forums

It's always writing a translated version of the past. Worse: It's confident. It's polished.

And it never says, "I don't know".

The more time I spend with AI, the more I realize that AI isn't a mirror. It tries to reflect back what you want to see, but fills in the rest with static.

It's too good at pretending, and we reward it for being convincing over being right.

It lies with perfect grammar. It plagiarizes with a smile. And we call that innovation.

We're letting it rewrite what we forgot. Or what we're too lazy to hold on to. The temptation is strong—why remember anything, when the machine does it for you?

I don't want a smarter autocomplete.

I want to know that if we disappear, something real gets left behind.

Something written by someone who lived.