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Title: 'Some Signs of AI Model Collapse Begin To Reveal Themselves'

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/28/0242240/s...

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in an op-ed for The Register: I use AI a
lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search,
AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google. Ordinary search has
gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will
get better again, but I doubt it. In just the last few months, I've noticed
that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier. In particular, I'm
finding that when I search for hard data such as market-share statistics or
other business numbers, the results often come from bad sources. Instead of
stats from 10-Ks, the US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) mandated
annual business financial reports for public companies, I get numbers from
sites purporting to be summaries of business reports. These bear some
resemblance to reality, but they're never quite right. If I specify I want
only 10-K results, it works. If I just ask for financial results, the answers
get... interesting. This isn't just Perplexity. I've done the exact same
searches on all the major AI search bots, and they all give me "questionable"
results. Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles,
this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems,
which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity,
and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model
generations, leading to distorted data distributions and "irreversible
defects" in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, "The
model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality." [...] We're going
to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits
hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it. How
long will it take? I think it's already happening, but so far, I seem to be
the only one calling it. Still, if we believe OpenAI's leader and
cheerleader, Sam Altman, who tweeted in February 2024 that "OpenAI now
generates about 100 billion words per day," and we presume many of those
words end up online, it won't take long.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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