Model Autophagy Disorder: AI Will Eat Itself
Model Autophagy Disorder is what happens when AI trains on AI trains on AI, the Habsburg chin of machine learning, features caving in generation after generation. The papers I've read worry about vanishing tail distributions and recursive training loops. Sure. But I keep circling a dumber worry. AI turns into the McDonald's we swore we'd never eat and eat every week anyway. Predictable, salty, engineered to hit the same note a billion times. The market pays for that note. It docks you for anything weird. So I don't think the models collapse. They just keep tasting more like the last one, because that's the order we keep placing.