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.
Its worse than that.
@TGAgovau
The TGA isn't incompetent.
They precisely know the crime they are now participating in.
It's very clear from their FOIA/ATIP of their PCR methods that they are hiding (redacting) the KAN gene PCR primers they use to measure this problem under the banner of it being proprietary information of the manufacturer (Bullshit).
There is nothing proprietary about a KAN gene that has been public art for over 40 years.
They are hiding this as they know if they qPCR in Spike they have to fail everything.
Elon Musk told a story that should terrify every AI company on Earth.
His son Saxon is autistic.
Saxon couldn’t understand why the family went to restaurants.
You can get the same food delivered.
You can call your friends over.
You can eat better at home for half the price.
So why go?
Musk: “He had an epiphany and said, ‘Oh, the reason people go to restaurants is to hang out with strangers.’”
A kid who takes the world literally just decoded something the rest of us never thought to question.
We like being around people we’ll never know.
Look at what we already built.
Delivery apps so you never wait in line.
Remote work so you never share an office.
Self-checkout so you never talk to a cashier.
Every innovation of the last 20 years was a bet against human proximity.
Every one paid off.
Until it didn’t.
Loneliness is now a public health emergency.
Depression has doubled since the smartphone.
The average American has fewer close friends than any generation in history.
We didn’t remove friction.
We removed the thing friction was hiding.
Now look at what’s coming.
AI agents that handle your emails.
AI companions that replace your conversations.
AI assistants that make every human interaction optional.
Same playbook. Same bet.
Except this time we’re not engineering out strangers.
We’re engineering out humans entirely.
The coffee shop where nobody knows your name.
The subway where no one speaks.
The restaurant where you’ll never see that couple again.
Those aren’t failed connections.
They’re the background radiation of belonging.
We don’t just need people who know us.
We need to exist in rooms full of people who don’t.
That’s what a kid understood at a dinner table that billion-dollar companies still can’t grasp in a boardroom.
We spent 20 years building a world you never have to show up to.
AI is about to finish the job.
And nothing it builds will ever replicate sitting in a room full of strangers and not feeling alone.
A tiny bee just did what chemotherapy couldn't.
Scientists in Australia discovered that honeybee venom can wipe out 100% of aggressive breast cancer cells in under 60 minutes.
And the healthy cells around them? Barely touched.
The breakthrough came from Dr. Ciara Duffy and her team at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, working alongside the University of Western Australia.
They tested venom drawn from 312 honeybees and bumblebees across Australia, Ireland, and England.
The target: triple-negative breast cancer and HER2-enriched breast cancer. Two of the deadliest, most stubborn forms of the disease.
The weapon: melittin. The same tiny peptide that makes a bee sting burn.
At one specific dose, melittin tore through cancer cell membranes completely within an hour. Within just 20 minutes, it shut down the chemical signals cancer cells need to grow and multiply.
Bumblebee venom, which lacks melittin, did nothing. Zero effect, even at high concentrations.
Scientists then recreated melittin synthetically in the lab and got almost identical results, meaning no bees need to be harmed to develop the therapy.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal npj Precision Oncology, the findings are still early-stage. Human trials haven't happened yet.
But one thing is clear. Nature has been hiding answers in plain sight all along, sometimes inside the smallest creatures on Earth.
Source: Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research / npj Precision Oncology (Dr. Ciara Duffy et al.)
A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it.
The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body.
His name is David Eagleman.
He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams.
Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since.
Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual.
You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open.
Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves.
This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed.
In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first.
Now sit with the implication of that for a second.
Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years.
If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight.
But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep.
Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense.
Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal.
They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise.
The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied.
The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you.
Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops.
So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly.
Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation.
A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium.
And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case.
Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep.
Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it.
For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all.
They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking.
The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream.
You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen.
Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.
43 years ago, Michael Jackson stepped onto the stage in that fedora and gave the world the moonwalk for the very first time 🕺✨
A legendary Billie Jean performance that still feels untouchable today 🔥🔥
@HouseLyndseyRN@TaniaC1072@Michell87463246 They know. Two of my friends with BC...their (seperate) oncologists told them they were seeing an unusual trend of cancer appearing in the breast on the same side as the injection site.
🇦🇺 Australian child psychiatrist @Jilliantweeting has faced relentless attacks for doing what too many doctors have been too afraid to do: speak out about the harms of youth gender medicine.
‼️ She was suspended from her job at Queensland Children's Hospital (@childhealthqld) and is engaged in ongoing legal action challenging her termination and seeking whistleblower protections.
‼️ She is being investigated by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (@Ahpra) for sharing an article from the @australian on @X reporting on their silencing of her colleague Dr Andrew Amos, who has also raised concerns about so-called “gender-affirming care”.
‼️ She was forcibly removed from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (@RANZCP) Congress after asking why they had suspended Dr Amos.
‼️ She has been publicly smeared and targeted simply for asking questions, raising evidence-based concerns about interventions like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and advocating for vulnerable young people.
And yet – she is still standing.
Still speaking out.
Still showing courage.
Still fighting for evidence-based medicine and for children who deserve proper care – not an ideology that tells them they were “born in the wrong body”.
Thank you Jillian. Australia needs more doctors like you 🩺♥️
#IStandWithJillianSpencer #Auspol