The long-term solution to bad internet content is not taking it down, not making everyone aware that it is substandard. The answer is to write better content. Audiences will read what is available.
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.
Encyc is keeping civilization going. Like Encyclopedia Galactica, except real. When you have the technology ready, we can send a version of Encyc to a distant planet at the edge of the galaxy.
@WikiBias@Wikipedia To be fair, this example is only a talk page. It is probably for the best that idiots self-identify on the talk pages, so that their edits can be reverted if needed.
Tired of this silly meme about Romans "stealing" myths and gods from the Greeks. In reality, most of the similarities come from a common Proto-Indo-European belief system that created these parallels from India to Persia to Germania to Britannia. Many other similarities were the result of syncretization, which was common in polytheistic religions. The Romans weren't the only ones who did this, every culture did. For example, the Greeks adopted Anatolian, Near Eastern, and Egyptian concepts and made them their own, often merging foreign gods with similar local versions to create new syncretized deities. Egyptians, Anatolians, and Near Eastern cultures did the same. Everyone did this.
When will this meme finally become stale?
Sara and I were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Chuck Norris, a great friend of Israel and a close personal friend.
Chuck brought martial arts and the warmth of his character to millions around the world.
May his memory be a blessing.
Assuming we start another coin where free airdrops are possible, would any of you be interested in owning ENCYC tokens? (also assuming said tokens would have close to zero monetary value). Would having a share of the Encyc pool have psychological value?