How Generative AI is Gobbling Up the Internet

If 2023 was the year of fearing generative AI, 2024 will be the year for some of those worries to come true.  Last summer, Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, and Ross Anderson wrote 'The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget', a paper hinting at AI models poisoning themselves in the (near) future. The warning was seen as farsighted and only theoretical, but evidence of the problematic technology has emerged.  The problem is called "model collapse”, where AI chatbots will lose the information they initially learned and replace it with synthetic data of other AI models. This degenerative process is not in theory any more. Last month, a Twitter user posted a screenshot showing that Grok, the large language