Leon van Steensel

(Chr.) music journalist/publicist. Happily married. Author ‘Home’ (Lannoo), 'Fierce Love' (Sacristy Press). RT≠endorsing. Geschiedsvervalsing/abuse=block.

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

Als het om lonen / positie arbeiders gaat, vind je me meer aan de kant van de SP.
Als het om Israel gaat, vind je me meer aan de kant van de SGP.
Als het om VS/ Trump gaat, vind je me meer aan de kant van de ophef-kritische partijen.
Als het om immigratie gaat, soms CU, soms VVD.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

.@mbachelet Madam Bachelet, you're going to get vetoed not because you “believe in human rights” but because we exposed that under your watch, the UN rights office shielded Beijing as they crushed the Uyghurs, Putin as he poisoned dissidents, and the Ayatollah as he killed women.

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

Iedereen en zijn moeder weet hoe er in de pers gereageerd zou worden als een rechts kabinet 'schaduwdeals' maakt, de minister doodleuk weigert daar info over te geven en van de Kamer verwacht dat ze onder het kruisje tekenen.

https://t.co/11zV13eScA

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

Or the tried and true method:

https://t.co/YB3pHWkIeC

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

You see, even when legacy media outlets cover Hamas' oppression of Palestinians, they always find a way to ultimately blame Israel

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

You can expect even less than complete silence from those shouting about claimed Israeli abuses - because for them, it is not about the abuses.

[Elizabeth Tsurkov @LizHurra]

New UN report shows that Hamas perpetrated "hundreds of cases of extrajudicial punishment" against Gazans. "These cases involved executions, kneecapping, bone-breaking with metal pipes or cement bricks and beatings" https://t.co/OyEcAuKdCu

[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.

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

@AmericanMama @MrAndyNgo Why keep the tweet then?

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

@AmericanMama Video is from something else.

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

Having lost a job and lost a spouse in my lifetime, they are very, very, so much not the same.

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

Imagine almost having your head sawed off by an Islamic migrant, and the press, so desperate not to offend Muslims, describes your attempted murder as just a "stabbing" and puts serious injuries in scare quotes.

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

“We want to correct Jewish News that stated a message was displayed to all guests. The message was only displayed to our Jewish guest.”

Modern antisemitism is breathtakingly blatant. Even in its denial or belittleing response.

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

"A spokesperson told Jewish News: 'We have checked every TV in every room in the Manor House hotel and can confirm that this message was displayed on only one TV, in this specific guest’s room. Any suggestion to the contrary is factually incorrect.'"

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

As a journalist, a bad first impression can be dealt with.

Blatantly lying in quoting someone to immediately suggest racism disqualifies you.

This is the BBC.

[Josh Howie @joshxhowie]

Community noted for lying on this propaganda machine’s first day. There will be many many more.

[Bas Belder @BasBelderMEP]

Afstand nemen van ‘probleemstaat’ Israël? Nederland moet juist toenadering zoeken https://t.co/Vi5NRVHhWv via @ewmagazinenl/opiniebijdrage Ruben Baumgarten (JA21/lid Eerste Kamer) en Chris Stoffer (SGP/lid Tweede Kamer)

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

@nicolelampert Truthfully, I don’t think she is anymore.

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

If it’s not adressed properly, heads will ironically still roll in Belfast.

#belfast

[Niels @Nielsdej]

Briljante metahumor dit. Doet me denken aan stukken van ''Leo Lucassen'', ''Willem Schinkel'' of ''Gloria Wekker''. Of bestaan die óók echt?

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

@mariekehoogwout (Vooral als je met een aan fanatieke religiositeit grenzende stelligheid claimt dat dit ‘gewoon realiteit’ is, was en hoort te zijn)

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

@mariekehoogwout Dat is een omstandigheid die die aanpak mede mogelijk maakt.

Voor mij blijft de vraag:

Als je de keus hebt tussen duidelijkheid, eerlijkheid en directheid…

…waarom kiest men dan structureel voor geniepig, dubbele tong, manipulerend woordgebruik en misleiding?

[Leon van Steensel @leonvansteensel]

@Coen_2018 Amerikaatje spelen sinds 2016 met CNN dat zichzelf als ‘The Resistance’ bestempelde.

[Artur Wilczynski @Arturmaks]

@AmbMcCarney Amplifying the genocide libel against Israel is antisemitic. It is intended not as criticism of Israeli policy but as demonization of Israel as a Jewish state.