h/t Will Schryver

Thread

Nav Toor @heynavtoor
10 Jun 2026 · 7:51 PM UTC
https://nitter.net/heynavtoor/status/2064797676475187520

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.