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AI produces gibberish when trained on too much AI-generated data

Generative AI models are now widely accessible, enabling everyone to create their own machine-made something. But these models can collapse if their training data sets contain too much AI-generated content.
  1. Emily Wenger

    1. Emily Wenger is in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA and at Meta AI, New York, New York, USA

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As generative artificial intelligence (AI) models — from Open AI’s ChatGPT to Meta’s Llama and beyond — become more available, the amount of AI-generated content on the Internet is swelling. AI-generated blogs, images and other content1 are now commonplace (see go.nature.com/3yd2czz). And although the effects of an AI-generated Internet on humans remain to be seen, in a paper in Nature, Shumailov et al.2 report that the proliferation of AI-generated content online could be devastating to the models themselves.

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Nature 631, 742-743 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02355-z

References

  1. Thompson, B., Dhaliwal, M. P., Frisch, P., Domhan, T. & Federico, M. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.05749 (2024).

  2. Shumailov, I. et al. Nature 631, 755–759 (2024).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Zhao, X. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.01953 (2023).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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