AI is getting dumber already. By Nav Toor.
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 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.

The tails die first. …
Generation 1: the full distribution. Every rare idea. Every unusual perspective.
Generation 5: the edges are gone. Only the middle remains.
Generation 9: a single narrow spike. One voice. One style. One version of reality.The weird, creative, unexpected parts of human writing are the first things Model Collapse erases. …
No model is immune. Model Collapse is not a bug in one system. It is a property of all systems that train on their own output.
Commenters:
By the way, humans have been doing the same thing for centuries. It’s called groupthink. …
Ironically, your post has the same rhythmic writing style as all the other AI posts on my feed. …
This is a typical AI language. You posted a thread about how dumb AI is getting, being trained by itself while using AI to write about it. Cannot get anymore ironic. Are you a dumb bot? …
The early Internet was wild. Crazy collectives on oddballs on USENET, MUDS, etc. On the early web, you could go down rabbit holes browsing everywhere. Lots was porn, but niche hobbies were everywhere.
Google changed everything. Their link centric algorithm changed everything. For years the Pre-Google Internet provided the link popularity that mattered, but a few generations of content later and the commercial spammed out Internet arrived. BBSes lost to well linked and crawlable sites. And that is what AI was trained on. … The knowledge graph keeps getting bigger and stupider.
When you had to learn HTML by hand to build web pages they were geeky and knowledgeable. They were niche, but knowledgable. … Each model gets dumber over time. Each new model is getting better at some raw technical skills, but dumber.
Two young men sitting next to me discussing how they no longer read articles. They skim the AI summary.
So not only are major outlets using AI to write articles. The information AI scrapes for these articles is AI-generated. And then ‘humans’ are only reading the AI summary of the AI slop from AI data.
Do you have any idea how quickly information degrades in this situation? This is a f-ing nightmare for humanity.

















