AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs

Artificial intelligences that are trained using text and images from other AIs, which have themselves been trained on AI outputs, could eventually become functionally useless. AIs such as ChatGPT, known as large language models (LLMs), use vast repositories of human-written text from the internet to create a statistical model of human language, so that they can predict which words are most likely to come next in a sentence. Since they have been available, the internet has become awash with AI-generated text, but the effect this will have on future AIs is unclear. Now, Ilia Shumailov at the University of Oxford and his colleagues have found that AI models trained using the outputs of other AIs become heavily biased, overly simple and disconnected from reality – a problem they call model collapse. This failure happens because of the way that AI models statistically represent text.