There was a lot of press ~2 years ago about this paper, and the term “model collapse”:
Training on generated data makes models forget
There was concern that the AI models had slurped up the Whole Internet and needed more data to get any smarter. Generated “synthetic data” was mooted as a possible solution. And there’s the fact that the Internet increasingly contains AI-generated content.
As so often happens (and happens fast in AI), research and industry move on, but the flashy news item remains in peoples’ minds. To this day I see posts from people who misguidedly think this is still a problem (and a such one more reason the whole AI house of cards is about to fall)
In fact, the big frontier models today (GPT, Gemini, Llama, Phi, etc) are all trained on synthetic data
As it turns out, quality of data is what really matters, not whether it’s synthetic or not; see " Textbooks Are All You Need "
And then some folks figured out how to use an AI Verifier to automatically curate that quality data: " Escaping Model Collapse via Synthetic Data Verification "
And people used clever math to make the synthetic data really high quality: " How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse? "
Summary:
“Model collapse” from AI-generated content is largely a Solved Problem.
There may be reasons the whole AI thing will collapse, but this is not one.
Humans are animals and like other systems created by evolution they have, as a group, to exhibit resiliency.
This would be why, i.m.o., people should be somewhat stubborn and should believe that their own values // chain of thought are better than their neighbor’s : by this feature, we go in many different directions simultaneously, we explore more possibilities. The resulting wider base makes us collectively more resilient.
So, don’t be too offended when some of us do like or dislike AI - - there will be time for reality to impose its necessities; in fact, it’s already happening.