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It’s like a human centipede where only the first person is a human and everyone else is an AI. It’s all shit, but it gets a bit worse every step.
I’ve been assuming this was going to happen since it’s been haphazardly implemented across the web. Are people just now realizing it?
People are just now acknowledging it. Execs tend to have a disdain for the minutiae. They’re like kids that only want to do the exciting bits. As a result things get fucked because they don’t really understand what they’re doing. As Muskrat would say “move fast and break things.” It’s a terrible mindset.
“Move Fast and Break Things” is Zuckerberg/Facebook motto, not Musk, just to note.
Oh, I stand corrected
It is very much the motto this idiot lives by. He just wasn’t the first to coin that phrase.
No, researchers in the field knew about this potential problem ages ago. It’s easy enough to work around and prevent.
People who are just on the lookout for the latest “aha, AI bad!” Headline, on the other hand, discover this every couple of months.
Good riddance.
this headline truly is threatening me with a good time
Model collapse is just a euphemism for “we ran out of stuff to steal”
or “we’ve hit a limit on what our new toy can do and here’s our excuse why it won’t get any better and AGI will never happen”
It’s more ''we are so focused on stealing and eating content, we’re accidently eating the content we or other AI made, which is basically like incest for AI, and they’re all inbred to the point they don’t even know people have more than two thumb shaped fingers anymore."
All such news make me want to live to the time when our world is interesting again. Real AI research, something new instead of the Web we have, something new instead of the governments we have. It’s just that I’m scared of what’s between now and then. Parasites die hard.
Let’s go, already!
How you can help: If you run a website and can filter traffic by user agent, get a list of the known AI scrapers agent strings and selectively redirect their requests to pre-generated AI slop. Regular visitors will see the content and the LLM scraper bots will scrape their own slop and, hopefully, train on it.
AI already long ago stopped being trained on any old random stuff that came along off the web. Training data is carefully curated and processed these days. Much of it is synthetic, in fact.
These breathless articles about model collapse dooming AI are like discovering that the sun sets at night and declaring solar power to be doomed. The people working on this stuff know about it already and long ago worked around it.
Both can be true.
Preserved and curated datasets to train AI on, gathered before AI was mainstream. This has the disadvantage of being stuck in time, so-to-speak.
New datasets that will inevitably contain AI generated content, even with careful curation. So to take the other commenter’s analogy, it’s a shit sandwich that has some real ingredients, and doodoo smeared throughout.
They’re not both true, though. It’s actually perfectly fine for a new dataset to contain AI generated content. Especially when it’s mixed in with non-AI-generated content. It can even be better in some circumstances, that’s what “synthetic data” is all about.
The various experiments demonstrating model collapse have to go out of their way to make it happen, by deliberately recycling model outputs over and over without using any of the methods that real-world AI trainers use to ensure that it doesn’t happen. As I said, real-world AI trainers are actually quite knowledgeable about this stuff, model collapse isn’t some surprising new development that they’re helpless in the face of. It’s just another factor to include in the criteria for curating training data sets. It’s already a “solved” problem.
The reason these articles keep coming around is that there are a lot of people that don’t want it to be a solved problem, and love clicking on headlines that say it isn’t. I guess if it makes them feel better they can go ahead and keep doing that, but supposedly this is a technology community and I would expect there to be some interest in the underlying truth of the matter.
I mean, we’ve seen already that AI companies are forced to be reactive when people exploit loopholes in their models or some unexpected behavior occurs. Not that they aren’t smart people, but these things are very hard to predict, and hard to fix once they go wrong.
Also, what do you mean by synthetic data? If it’s made by AI, that’s how collapse happens.
The problem with curated data is that you have to, well, curate it, and that’s hard to do at scale. No longer do we have a few decades’ worth of unpoisoned data to work with; the only way to guarantee training data isn’t from its own model is to make it yourself
Also, what do you mean by synthetic data? If it’s made by AI, that’s how collapse happens.
But that’s exactly my point. Synthetic data is made by AI, but it doesn’t cause collapse. The people who keep repeating this “AI fed on AI inevitably dies!” Headline are ignorant of the way this is actually working, of the details that actually matter when it comes to what causes model collapse.
If people want to oppose AI and wish for its downfall, fine, that’s their opinion. But they should do so based on actual real data, not an imaginary story they pass around among themselves. Model collapse isn’t a real threat to the continuing development of AI. At worst, it’s just another checkbox that AI trainers need to check off on their “am I ready to start this training run?” Checklist, alongside “have I paid my electricity bill?”
The problem with curated data is that you have to, well, curate it, and that’s hard to do at scale.
It was, before we had AI. Turns out that that’s another aspect of synthetic data creation that can be greatly assisted by automation.
For example, the Nemotron-4 AI family that NVIDIA released a few months back is specifically intended for creating synthetic data for LLM training. It consists of two LLMs, Nemotron-4 Instruct (which generates the training data) and Nemotron-4 Reward (which curates it). It’s not a fully automated process yet but the requirement for human labor is drastically reduced.
the only way to guarantee training data isn’t from its own model is to make it yourself
But that guarantee isn’t needed. AI-generated data isn’t a magical poison pill that kills anything that tries to train on it. Bad data is bad, of course, but that’s true whether it’s AI-generated or not. The same process of filtering good training data from bad training data can work on either.
They’ll just start using a chrome user agent
You can validate that against user telemetry data expected from a browser.
Only if enough people do it. Then again, loads scrapers outside of AI already pretend to be normal browsers.
Are there any good lists of known AI user agents? Ideally in a dependency repo so my server can get the latest values when the list is updated.
Okay but I like using perchance cus they dont profit off anything 👉👈
a large chunk of that site is some dudes lil hobby project and its kinda neat interacting with the community and seein how the code works. Its the only bot I’ll ever use cus they arent profiting off of other people shit. the only money they get is from ads and thats it.
Dont kill me with downvotes, I like making up cool OC concepts or poses n stuff and then drawing em.
It’s kinda interesting in how it actually roughly parallels the dawn of the nuclear age in some specific ways. Namely, that there’s a clear “purity” line established by the advent of the technology - and I mean that literally, not figuratively. Content on the internet is going to have a very similar dividing line. But it’s also going to be way harder to definitively source data from before that line, unless someone clairvoyant happened to offline and archive a huge storage array with a complete internet snapshot right before ML made its public debut. And I know exactly what the scale of that storage commitment would be, and how much it would cost. So I’m certain nobody has done that.
This would ideally become standardized among web servers with an option to easily block various automated aggregators.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on - social media, public image storage, copyrighted media, etc. All those sites with extensive privacy policies who are signing contracts to permit their content for training.
Without laws (and I’m not sure I support anything in this regard yet), I do not see AI progress slowing. Clearly inbreeding AI models has a similar effect as in nature. Fortunately there is enough original digital content out there that this does not need to happen.
Well it means they need some ability to reject some content, which means they need a level of transparency they would never want otherwise.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on
Absolutely. It’s more a matter of principle for me. Kind of like the digital equivalent of leaving fake Amazon packages full of dog poo out front to make porch pirates have a bad day.
It is their own fault for poisoning the internet with their slop.
DUDE ITS SO FUCKING ANNOYING TRYNNA USE GOOGLE IMAGES ANYMORE–
ALL IT GIVES ME IS AI ART. IM SO FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.
In case anyone doesn’t get what’s happening, imagine feeding an animal nothing but its own shit.
I use the “Sistermother and me are gonna have a baby!” example personally, but I am a awful human so
Photocopy of a photocopy is my go-to metaphor for model collapse.
Not shit, but isn’t that what brought about mad cow disease? Farmers were feeding cattle brain matter that had infected prions. Idk if it was cows eating cow brains or other animals though.
It was the remains of fish which we ground into powder and fed to other fish and sheep, whose remains we ground into powder and fed to other sheep and cows, whose remains we ground to powder and fed to other cows.
So yes. That’s what’s happening.
Maybe the internet will get a prion and die
Usually we get an AI winter, until somebody develops a model that can overcome that limitation of needing more and more data. In this case by having some basic understanding instead of just having a regurgitation engine for example. Of course that model runs into the limit of only having basic understanding, not advanced understanding and again there is an AI winter.
Have you seen the newest model from OpenAI? They managed to get some logic into the system, so that it is now better at math and programming 😄 it is called “o1” and cones in 3 sizes where the largest is not released yet.
The downside is, that generation of answers takes more time again.
Kind of like how true thoughts and opinions on complex topics are boiled down to digestible concepts for others to understand who then perpetuate those concepts without understanding them and the meaning degrades and we dont think anymore, just repeat stuff in social media comments.
Side note… this article sucks and seems like it was ai generated. Repetitive and no author credit? Just says it was originally posted elsewhere.
Generative AI isnt in danger of being killed as this clickbait titled suggests… just hindered.
hindered.
I doubt that.
By chance, is that based on other peoples succinct social media comments on ai?
No. I simply don’t see a plausible scenario for that. The social media comments are quite deplorable. You really have to look for bubbles with educated people. I don’t know why this gets so much traction. Maybe it’s because the copyright industry likes it, or maybe it feeds some psychological need like Intelligent Design.
Cant blame me for asking :)
Seems like tools to recognize ai content to prevent synthetic input avoids model degredation.
If those tools are up to the task then i would agree it probably doesnt hinder model training. Not sure what the reality is, or if the need for those tools creates a barrier to entry for a significant portion of those trying to create models with internet-crawled data.
There is no problem with ingesting synthetic data. Well, at least none coming from the fact that it is synthetic. If there was a fundamental difference between the 1s and 0s encoding synthetic data and the 1s and 0s encoding any other data, then you could easily filter it. But there isn’t. The ideas that this community has are magical thinking.
I want to be constructive so:
Please consider the unintentional disinformation people create when they try to sound like they know what they are talking about. Contributing to discussion is difficult on complex topics.
Its perfectly natural to want to continue a conversation to the point where you might fill in some details instead of researching a topic or not responding. But this is seriously harmful in the age of disinformation. Theres plenty i dont know. But there are tools expressly created to identify ai content to avoid using it in model training. The consequence of using synthetic data is the only topic in the article you are commenting on. Either read the article or please dont feel like you need to come up with a response.
Yes, I shouldn’t bother replying in these threads. In truth, I’ve already given up on this community but sometimes when I’m bored I can’t help a little peek. Maybe in a few years, some of the smarter ones will wonder why nothing ever came of this. Anyway, be careful with those AI detectors. They don’t work and sooner or later someone is going to get in trouble over that.
Theres a link to the other article, in this article. Says Kristin Houser wrote it…although you may have a point about the rest.
ty
I couldn’t care less.
I for one support the AI centipede and hope it shits into it’s own input until it dies
Having now flooded the internet with bad AI content not surprisingly its now eating itself. Numerous projects that aren’t AI are suffering too as the quality of text reduces.
Looks like that artist drawing self portraits as his alzheimer got worse and worse.
It’s basically AI alzheimers
AIzheimers?
Deep fired AI art sucks and is a decade late to the party
If we can work out which data conduits are patrolled more often by AI than by humans, we could intentionally flood those channels with AI content, and push Model Collapse along further. Get AI authors to not only vet for “true human content”, but also pay licensing fees for the use of that content. And then, hopefully, give the fuck up on their whole endeavor.
