Peter Katel

Ex-journalist, certified court interpreter, ATA-certified Spanish-2-English translator, Albuquerque-NM based, RT means worth reading.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[Peter Katel @PeterKatel]

Cuba's collapse began decades ago. Leonardo Padura, Cuba's star novelist, chronicles the decline in his latest work. Excerpts in my (unauthorized) translation: https://t.co/wa3DcEHSK3

[Alejandro Velasco @AleVelascoNYU]

At this point, taking the actual operation, Trump’s press conference, and Delcy Rodriguez’s press conference into consideration, it seems fairly certain (though of course, unconfirmed) that Maduro was given up by the remaining government apparatus in a back channel deal. 1/x

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

Holiday greetings for Ukrainians from Robert de Niro.

Thank you, Sir!

[Peter Katel @PeterKatel]

@ChrisO_wiki @juliaioffe @joni_askola Followed by a massive purge. Trump might like that as well.

[Adrian Carrasquillo @Carrasquillo]

What on earth

[Peter Katel @PeterKatel]

Marco Rubio does not speak for all Cuban-Americans. In NYT this morning:

[Peter Katel @PeterKatel]

@DeanneStillman2 @BarakRavid Not to mention, the whole point was to ambush Zelensky on Putin's behalf.

[Peter Katel @PeterKatel]

@P_Kallioniemi @threadreaderapp unroll please

[Peter Katel @PeterKatel]

@Jose_deCordoba And now Gabbard is confirmed. Perfect timing.

[Mother Jones @MotherJones]

The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves. https://t.co/y9bE0MvGZc

[SPIES&VESPERS @SpiesVespers]

IT'S TIME FOR STRANGE SPY FACTS! WATCH AND TIMEPIECE EDITION!
Upon arrival in Moscow in May of 1960, Ramon Mercader received the gold star of the Order of the Hero. The Politburo also presented him with a solid gold watch inscribed from a previous unknown codename “Lopez”

[Deanne Stillman @DeanneStillman2]

Standing by for the #JFKFiles. Whatever the new info is, the fact remains that Oswald and his mother were locked together in a desperate pursuit of fame and recognition, as I wrote in American Confidential. "Dazzling and evocative prose." @AirMailWeekly https://t.co/f5v2SCzNSi

[NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @NOELreports]

SitRep - 16/12/24 - Lots of repelled Russian mechanized attacks

An overview of the daily events in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Lots of Russian attackes were repelled, new Norwegian aid and the Peklo cruise missile enters mass production.

REPOST=appreciated

1/X

[Laura V. Strickler @strickdc]

Scoop from @JuliaEAinsley and @DidiMartinez5 on #massdeportation

Trump plans to scrap policy restricting ICE arrests at churches, schools, hospitals https://t.co/K3FpEtqW55 via @nbcnews

[Claude Taylor @TrueFactsStated]

I forgot about this!

[David Corn @DavidCornDC]

NEW: In my OUR LAND newsletter, I report on how Kash Patel created a false narrative of the Trump-Russia scandal to cover up Trump's treasonous actions & became a useful idiot for Putin.
https://t.co/TVm8vepLWJ

Get a FREE trial subscription to OUR LAND @ https://t.co/REX6S9GbFg.

[Laura Anaya-Morga @lauraanayam_]

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is shutting down its Spanish operations effective today. I was laid off along with my RJ en español colleagues.

[14ymedio @14ymedio]

Muere Carlos Aldana, el gurú ideológico del Partido al que Castro defenestró en el Período Especial https://t.co/9QqcRa0rJo

👉🏼Conocido como El Mulato, había sido ingresado hace varias semanas en el hospital Hermanos Ameijeiras por un trauma cerebral tras una caída

[Brian Winter @BrazilBrian]

“You are probably not aware…” is a… provocative… way to begin a letter to Donald Trump. Sheinbaum also floating reciprocal tariffs today. Getting hotter.