The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

As another of the paper’s authors, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, wrote in a blog post discussing the paper: “Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.”

The paper is here:

Shumailov, Ilia, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, and Ross Anderson. “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget.” arXiv, May 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493.