Low-Background Steel, Bodybuilding, and the Fallout of AI Writing

Low-background steel refers to any steel produced before the detonations of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s. Steel manufacturing requires oxygen for the smelting process, and post-atomic bomb traces of nuclear fallout contaminated the atmospheric oxygen. The result? Steel that’s unsuitable for sensitive equipment used to monitor radiation. Particle detectors, Geiger counters, and other specialty instruments all require the use of this so-called low-background steel.

The need for this specific steel wasn’t foreseen. How could we have known the slow infiltration of nuclear fallout into one of the most produced materials in the world? This led to a very Hollywood-seeming solution: warships sunk during World War II. These ships, constructed before the dropping of the bombs, were built with low-background steel. Salvage operations recovered these vessels and repurposed the metals for use in critical applications. The only way to produce equipment for the future was by looking to the past. The present had been forever altered, and steelmakers could no longer go back.

Bodybuilding shares a lot in common with low-background steel. Anabolic steroids were invented in the 1930s—strikingly close to the turning point for low-background steel. Post-1930, there’s always the possibility that bodybuilders are using steroids. If someone wants a clearer picture of the potentials of natural human physiology, more honest answers can be gleaned from the past than the present.

What we see after the 1930s is a trend toward larger physical size. While multiple factors contribute to this, the ever-present influence of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancers must be taken into account. Over time, the visual imagery and associations around physical size crossed over into mainstream consciousness. Think of male leads in early 2000s movies versus some of the big stars today. We’re talking about Brad Pitt in Fight Club versus Dwayne Johnson in Fast & Furious. I see a lot of people wanting to emulate this physical size rather than the lean fitness of earlier aesthetics. What needs to be recognized is that these aspirations don’t account for the fact that many of these images of physique are not built with low-background steel. They are, in effect, contaminated with the fallout of steroids.

So what does this have to do with reading?

Well, we’re in the midst of atomic testing again—except this time, the fallout is digital. Steroids have flooded the bodybuilding market for decades, and now large language models (LLMs) have flooded the writing world. Commercially available LLMs have been around for the past few years, and writers are using them. What’s lost and gained when writers use LLMs to augment their writing isn’t the point of this post. I just want to flag that, like low-background steel and the bronze age of bodybuilding, we are past the point of no return.

Writing will change over time in ways we can’t predict. Even if writers commit to avoiding these new tools, readers will still interact with LLM-generated content daily, and their tastes will be modified as a result. The physical creep of human physique will be replicated in literature, as an unseen hand subtly shifts our preferences and the media landscape is forever altered.

If you’re a reader and want to avoid work where AI may have been used, I suggest you take the above examples as advice on how to deal with this turning point. Go survey the sunken wrecks of the literary world in a used bookstore. If a book was published before 2022, you can rest assured it was written, edited, and published by human beings. Fortunately for us, the backlog of amazing books is long—and we don’t have to dive to the bottom of the Red Sea to get them.