Synthetic Data's Feedback Loop: What Happens When Models Train on Their Own Outputs?

You have a copy machine. You copy a document. The copy is slightly blurry. You copy the copy. It is blurrier. You copy it again. After ten generations, it is unrecognizable. This is model collapse. AI models are now training on data generated by previous AI models. The internet is filling with synthetic content. The next generation of models will train on that synthetic content. And the generation after that will train on the synthetic content of the synthetic content. The signal is degrading.…