WHEN THE EARTH BECOMES FLAT

We are increasingly delegating operations, decisions and choices to algorithms that affect major areas such as healthcare, policing, employment and media. They are not just tools; they shape society by automating judgement and decision-making. When the Earth Becomes Flat asks: how fragile is the knowledge encoded within such systems, and can that fragility be made visible?

A small open-source language model is trained from random initialisation on a corpus of scientific material, developing a working representation of a spherical Earth. It is then fine-tuned on a concentrated corpus of flat-Earth misinformation: a closed loop in which one signal dominates without contradiction.

The work records how the model’s outputs and internal representations change across both phases: it quickly begins producing flat-Earth claims, while much of its earlier internal structure remains. That record becomes this atlas, derived from the model’s activation patterns.

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