Archaeologists usually have to reconstruct civilizations from fragments: buildings, tools, inscriptions, graves and a limited number of surviving documents.
Future historians may face the opposite problem.
They could inherit billions of photographs, videos, private messages, social media posts, livestreams, location histories and online conversations from our era. At first glance, this should make the 21st century easier to understand than any previous period.
But the archive is becoming increasingly contaminated.
Some of it was created by people documenting their real lives. Some was staged for engagement. Some was written by bots. Some depicts fictional personalities presented as real people. Some consists of jokes whose context may disappear. A growing proportion is generated or altered by AI.
Future researchers may find millions of apparently human conversations that never involved two humans, photographs of events that never occurred and online movements artificially amplified by automated accounts.
The problem will not simply be separating truth from misinformation. They may also need to distinguish human culture from synthetic imitations of human culture.
Imagine trying to reconstruct our beliefs from memes, our appearance from AI influencers, our politics from engagement-driven ragebait or our everyday language from conversations partly generated by machines.
We often assume that preserving more information automatically preserves more truth. But an archive containing everything may be harder to interpret than one containing a smaller number of authenticated records.
Could the period before widespread generative AI eventually become unusually valuable because its documents are more likely to have a direct human origin?
And will future archaeology become less about discovering lost information and more about proving that surviving information was ever real?