Some days I fear for the future of the human race with Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Model (LLM) research being industrialized at breakneck speed. And then some days the parlour trick is exposed.

There’s this fascinating idea floating around that AI might be – in a weird twist of poetic justice – slowly destroying itself. A paper published in Nature1 showed how AI eating its own outputs are, after a few short iterations, reduced to nonsense in a phenomenon researchers are calling model collapse.