The Golden Age Eating Itself

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:59:50 +0000

AI Hype, Model Collapse, and the Dead Internet

I've been watching AI models dream about my French Bulldog lately. The images are charming at first: stumpy legs, bat ears, that distinctive underbite. But look closer. The church steeple behind him has melted. The cobblestones have become scales. And sometimes, in the background, there's a figure that might be human, might be furniture, might be nothing at all.

This aesthetic glitch mirrors something far more troubling happening inside the models themselves. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge found that when AI models train on AI-generated content, they don't just get worse. They collapse.¹ In one striking example, a model trained iteratively on its own outputs devolved from coherent text about medieval architecture into rambling nonsense about "jack-tailed rabbits" and "yellow-skinned" creatures that existed nowhere but in its own degrading probability distributions.

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The Golden Age Eating Itself

AI Hype, Model Collapse, and the Dead Internet