Wally Brath

“We are perishing for want of wonder not for want of wonders.” - GK Chesterton

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

Loved biking at East Bluff in Copper Harbor.

[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.

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

Enjoying some family time in Copper Harbor, MI.

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@history_alice @VikingBooksUK @PenguinUKBooks Congratulations!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@AnnaFromUA_YT Thank you for your continued passionate reporting!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@megha_lilly Psalm 29:2: The psalmist proclaims, "Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness". Beauty ultimately flows from the holiness of God.

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@AlaskanKate Congratulations!!!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@lida1xs So good!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@BellaWallerstei 🙌

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@20th_Centurygal Steve Morse

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@TNTSportsUS how many turtlenecks does @BarkleyonTNT own?

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@JenniferEValent Maranatha!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

Helpful prayer prompts adapted from Pastor Tim Boucher: Look back - thankful for something yesterday. Look up - encounter Christ the Living Word. Look in - what is stealing my joy? Look around - encourage someone.
Look ahead - hope in God’s faithfulness and His promises to come.

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@juliet_turner6 🙌

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@sciencegirl Fish and chips

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@ShangguanJiewen Once they can put on a fitted sheet, I’m in!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@sciencegirl That is super cool!

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

https://t.co/8GZ38tdmtr

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@AnnaFromUA_YT 🙌

[Wally Brath @wallybrath]

@AnnaFromUA_YT Thank you for your updates! 🙏🏼