I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s a followup to my last column, about a massive, unappreciated obstacle that looms ahead for AI technology and what, if anything, can be done about it.
AI has been wildly successful, in both good and the bad senses. Chatbots and artbots are flooding the internet with synthetically generated text and images, often drowning out the contributions of human beings. While their output is frequently flawed, the creators of these bots insist that they’re going to keep improving, becoming more creative and less error-prone, and it’s only a matter of time before they leave human beings in the dust.
However, this may not be true. AI may be about to hit a hard stop, and its very proliferation may be the cause of its downfall.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
Of course, these bots aren’t flawless. For all their talents, they sometimes generate garbled text, or false factual claims, or weirdly melted and deformed images. Their creators dismissed these as inevitable early bugs in a technology that’s still maturing and improving. They promised that with more training data, AI would keep getting better, until it could not only match human performance but surpass it.
But there’s a problem: the internet is no longer pristine. It’s been polluted by immense quantities of texts and images generated by these AIs. There’s no reliable way to screen this out, which means that later generations of AIs will be trained on data created by earlier generations of AIs. Because of this, AIs are no longer learning how to be more human; they’re learning how to be more like AI.
You can think of this as the AI version of inbreeding—and it’s a problem for the same reason that inbreeding is harmful in nature.
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