Museum of the Human Web: Relics of an Era Before AI Collaboration
I present a collection of artifacts from the fifty years when the web was built solely by human hands, from ARPANET to the dawn of ChatGPT. This era, defined by vision and stubbornness without machine co-pilots, is ending as creation becomes a collaboration with AI. These objects now stand as relics of the last time we figured it out alone, with proceeds supporting the Internet Archive and Computer History Museum.
Creation is becoming a collaboration with machines, making these artifacts relics of the last time we did this alone.
- NateEag
The Web is not being developed "in collaboration with the machines."
Humans downloaded the Web and shoved it into the hopper of a sausage grinder.
When another human turns the crank, they may get something that can be made a part of the Web.
Are LLMs amazing? Yes.
Are we collaborating with them? No.
When we use an LLM's output to expand the Web, we are taking the hard work of those humans who toiled to build the Web and pretending it's ours, because when it's mashed into sausage, it's hard to recognize the ingredients.
Yes, some humans have built motors that can be used to turn the crank without direct human intervention.
The crank still turns only when a human starts the motor running.
- jaredcwhite
> how we make things is fundamentally changing
Who's "we" ??
I and a significant number of people I know and interact with on a regular basis are creating and publishing stuff for the human indie open web much like we have for years and decades. The underlying specs and hardware and tools and such get better (sometimes, the ones which haven't enshittified), but the techniques largely stay the same.
Put down the AI pills, maybe go touch grass!
- cookingoils
Whose “human web” is this? The collection seems to lean heavily toward the mainstream, commercial, silicon valley web. It leaves out much of the strange, personal, experimental web. Where are the works of artists like Olia Lialina?
For a more representative museum of the human web see: https://art.teleportacia.org/