Is AI Quietly Killing Itself—And The Internet?
POLAND - 2023/12/07: In this photo illustration an AI logo is displayed on a smartphone with ... [ ] Artificial Intelligence symbol in the background. (Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Interest in artificial intelligence continues to surge, as Google searches over the past 12 months are at 92% of their all-time peak, but recent research suggests AI’s success could be its downfall. Amid the growth of AI content online, a group of researchers at Cambridge and Oxford universities set out to see what happens when generative AI tools query content produced by AI. What they found was alarming.
University of Oxford’s Dr. Ilia Shumailov and the team of researchers discovered that when generative AI software relies solely on content produced by genAI, the responses begin to degrade, according to the study published in Nature last month.
After the first two prompts, the answers steadily miss the mark, followed by a significant quality downgrade by the fifth attempt and a complete devolution to nonsensical pablum by the ninth consecutive query. The researchers dubbed this cyclical overdose on generative AI content model collapse—a steady decline in the learned responses of the AI that continually pollutes the training sets of repeating cycles until the output is a worthless distortion of reality.
“It is surprising how fast model collapse kicks in and how elusive it can be. At first, it affects minority data—data that is badly represented. It then affects diversity of the outputs and the variance reduces. Sometimes, you observe small improvement for the majority data, that hides away the degradation in performance on minority data. Model collapse can have serious........
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