“The web is becoming increasingly a dangerous place to look for your data,” Rice University graduate student Sina Alemohammad, who coauthored a 2023 paper that coined the term “MAD” — short for “Model Autophagy Disorder” — to describe the effects of AI self-consumption, told the NYT. https://futurism.com/ai-slowly-killing-itself

One way to explain this is to realise that LLMs don’t learn about relationships between facts, but between tokens, the linguistic forms that Bender described. The tokens “Tom Cruise’s mother” are linked to the tokens “Mary Lee Pfeiffer”, but the reverse is not necessarily true. The model isn’t reasoning, it’s playing with words, and the fact…

…this kind of short-sighted innovation, just the kind Silicon Valley adores, is untested and untrustworthy and will cause a societal meltdown that will make the results of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans look like Sunday school, possibly ending in a near-famine if adopted.