Usenet as a Technology Incubator
Usenet has always been ahead of the curve, technologically. It was created in 1979 and became one of the first Internet services available to users outside of government contractors. In fact, “Usenet” is a portmanteau of “User Network” because it was designed for regular people to be able to connect to and enjoy it.
Because it was created in labs at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, the spirit of academic curiosity is built into its very DNA. The first users were technical researchers, so much of their early conversations focused on advancements in hardware and software, new techniques, and ways to streamline data processing and transfer. A lot of our modern technical landscape was developed and improved on Usenet.
To this day, Usenet still attracts tech-savvy people looking to collaborate with others who share their interests, and high-level discussions happen every day on a variety of newsgroups.
AI and Usenet Have a Long History
The earliest discussions of AI on Usenet trace back as far as 1983, only a few years after the protocol went live. The first AI-focused newsgroup was net.ai, which was changed to comp.ai when the Big 8 Hierarchies were introduced during the Great Renaming of 1987.
A lot of early AI research happened or was shared directly on Usenet, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the questions about the ethics of AI that we are debating today were originally asked on comp.ai.philosophy, including how dangerous it could be and whether using publicly available content for training should be considered theft.
Usenet was also where natural language processing, the basis for modern AI systems like OpenAI, was originally devised and where the earliest development of Lisp, a programming language designed for AI, happened.