We’ve spent enormous effort figuring out how to generate AI media.
I’ve been thinking about a different problem:
Where does all of it go?
If AI makes media effectively unlimited, generation eventually stops being the only interesting problem.
Organization becomes infrastructure.
That’s what I’m exploring with Topics Archive.
From Feeds to Topics
Most internet media is organized around feeds.
Creator
↓
Post
↓
Feed
↓
Gone from attention
Topics Archive explores a different structure:
Topic
↓
Identity
↓
Metadata
↓
Generated Artifacts
↓
Relationships
↓
Discovery
Instead of making the post the primary unit, make the subject persistent.
A topic could be:
a person
a country
a city
an animal
a historical event
a Bible story
a soccer match
a scientific concept
Then generated songs, images, videos, biographies, metadata, and other artifacts can accumulate around it.
Testing the Model With Music
I’ve already experimented with the concept through several archives.
One is the Bible Musical Archive, where stories and subjects become musical artifacts.
Another is the World Cup Musical Archive, where matches can become persistent topics with generated music associated with them.
I’ve also built a large biography collection.
The point isn’t simply:
AI can make a song about anything.
We already know generative models can create enormous quantities of media.
The interesting question is:
How do we organize generated culture when creating it becomes nearly free?
The Technical Problem
A topic-based archive starts resembling a graph more than a traditional music library.
For example:
World Cup
↓
Tournament
↓
Match
↙ ↘
Team A Team B
↓
Location
↓
Generated Song
Now the media is connected to structured entities.
That opens possibilities around APIs, geographic interfaces, search, recommendation, automated generation pipelines, and programmatic archives.
Why I Think This Matters
Generative media is going to produce an enormous amount of cultural material.
Feeds are optimized for what’s new.
Archives are optimized for what persists.
I’m interested in building for the second problem.
Maybe the next major challenge in generative media isn’t generating another billion artifacts.
Maybe it’s creating structures that make those artifacts discoverable, contextual, and worth preserving.
Topics Archive:
https://topicsarchive.openverb.org
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