Member-only story
“AI Inbreeding” Is Making An Already Bad Problem Even Worse
An ouroboros within an ouroboros.
An ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a serpentine dragon eating its own tail, which is meant to depict the cyclical nature of destruction and rebirth. In the modern world, however, its meaning has shifted to a shorthand for self-destruction. A system so flawed it eats itself alive until nothing is left. It’s easy to see why AI has been labelled an ouroboros. These machines need to consume our data to exist, yet they are simultaneously expected to be existential threats to us and our livelihoods. But AI’s self-consuming nature goes far, far deeper than this, and it could have horrific consequences.
This problem all starts with data.
Modern LLMs require an unfathomable amount of data to function. As such, an entire data economy has been set up to scrape, gather, sort and label every conceivable kind of human-generated data out there for these models. This operation collates practically the entire internet and offers it up to train AIs on a colossal scale.
But the pool of data has dried up. This isn’t a surprise; three years ago, researchers predicted that AI labs would run out of new training data by late this year. And indeed, a report from Stanford has found that the pool of human-generated data has been…
