While the fury toward industrial scale AI continues unabated, a new reality has materialized in the shadows of this first condition. As each new model replaces a previous AI model at increasingly faster rates, a literal scrapyard of AI models is amassed, not unlike junkyards of earlier industrial products, cars, ships, etc. Only now, the time to reach decommission and obsolescence is much shorter. Not decades, not years, but months and sometimes even shorter timeframes.

Scrapyard AI responds specifically to the condition of AI obsolescence and crafts new operations from the growing collection of older AI models. Scrapyard AI operates at the scale of planetary computing, sharpened by its focus on Earth Observation. This planetary computing inquiry configures older, yet powerful AI systems to gain an understanding of the impact of industrial level mining operations on landscapes across Earth by nudging scrapyard AI multimodal models to interpret and describe open-source satellite imagery collected from mining sites across the planet. As such Scrapyard AI demonstrates a novel combination of AI model critique via reuse and land resource interpretation reclamation.