r/DigitalHumanities

One of the stranger second-order effects of generative AI has very little to do with model benchmarks.

It has to do with old books.

Anthropic’s Project Panama showed how valuable physical books became as training material at industrial scale. But there is another characteristic old material has that is becoming increasingly interesting: provenance.

A book printed in 1981 obviously predates ChatGPT. An archived forum post from 2004 probably does too. A random page produced in 2026 is much harder to reason about.

This creates an odd historical situation.

Frontier models inherited decades of overwhelmingly human-produced material. They learned from it, became capable of generating convincing material themselves, and are now contributing enormous amounts of synthetic information back into the environment future systems may learn from.

I went considerably further down this rabbit hole in the latest Gonzo Capital essay, including recursive training, model collapse, “Human Authored” certification, Anthropic’s book-scanning operation and the idea of the pre-generative internet as a kind of informational fossil layer.

It’s deliberately less sanitized than the material we publish through Arcanum, but the data provenance question is one we think is worth paying attention to.

The Internet Ouroboros

https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/

Interested to hear whether people think provenance actually becomes a meaningful moat as synthetic material proliferates, or whether better filtering and verification make the whole distinction increasingly irrelevant.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Business Informatics and currently work as a Product Owner. I’m considering doing a Master’s in Digital Humanities but I’m not sure if it makes sense with my background.

What interests me is the combination of technology and the social sciences/humanities. I don’t necessarily want to go deeper into the technical side, but rather understand how technology affects society, culture and people.
I feel like this could complement my current background quite well, but I’m wondering if I’m overlooking any downsides or if it might be a strange choice career-wise.

The other option I’m considering is UX/UI, although I’m not sure if I actually want to specialize in that… again, not sure and I am very indecisive.
(As a side note, I’d also like to learn frontend development in my free time, but I see that more as a personal interest than as a potential career change.)

Would you recommend a Digital Humanities Master’s in my situation or would you go for something else?

Also: I’m including the course list from the previous year, in case anyone wants to take a look at it for reference.
https://ufind.univie.ac.at/en/vvz_sub.html?path=328715

I am trying to find a community of people that discusses AI like programmers do on reddit but I haven't found anything. Do you have any pointers? I understand it is sensitive given that a lot of people within academia are harshly anti-AI, but I don't think that kind of shaming should keep people from discussing the usefulness of these tools. And anonimity might be required at this stage I guess, so subreddits or forums would be the natural place