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.
A World Cup is supposed to be showcase for the host nation and this is a showcase for ‘America’. They’re showing how much they hate the world. Like China’s Olympics was a ‘coming out’ party to the world, this is a ‘party’s over’ message from ‘America’.
⚽️🇺🇸 Mi teoría sobre este Mundial es que la llegada de miles de corresponsales internacionales pondrá el foco en lo increíblemente decadente que es Estados Unidos: desigualdad, deterioro de los servicios públicos, drogadicción, polarización, violencia…
Así empezamos:
I love the angle taken by @kenearlys on the Champions League final.
He’s absolutely right to dedicate so much time to how Arsenal waste time 🗑️
The drinking water and human life lines 🤣
🚨 OFICIAL: Fiscalía revela que el director de Azul Azul, José Ramón Correa, compró el 21% de la U con un préstamo de US$7,5 millones de un fondo vinculado a la cúpula de Huachipato.
La BBC planea omitir la transmisión del espectáculo del medio tiempo de la final del Mundial. Se espera que la cadena televisiva continúe con su esquema habitual como en todos los mundiales de que los comentaristas analicen la primera mitad del partido. ❌🎤