The Artist goes fishing in the ocean. AI goes fishing in the aquarium.

This is basically the problem people seem to be having with AI content creator programs like Chat GPT or Microsoft Copilot. They can’t create new experiences, they can only “fish” for somebody else’s old ones. 

But there’s an even bigger issue.  

The place where AI mines the vast majority of its content is, of course, the Internet. But as more and more of the Internet is AI-created content, it’s basically cannibalizing itself.

This idea will be unsurprising to anybody who sits down and thinks about it for two minutes. But now it’s not just an idea. It seems to actually be happening.

From Popular Mechanics: “A New Study Says AI Is Eating Its Own Tail.”

Some highlights: 

• “Language models like ChatGPT are trained by using content found online, and as AI creates more “synthetic” content, it could create an engineering problem known as “model collapse.”
• “Filtering synthetic data out of training models is becoming a major research area, and will likely grow as AI content begins to fill the internet.”

The physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder also has a nice YouTube video on the subject, aptly titled “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

And over on Bustle, the actress Dakota Johnson talks about how AI affects movies:

“Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out BS. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to frickin’ want to see those.” 

There’s been a lot written by the usual suspects about how AI is allegedly going to put many creative people out of work (especially in Hollywood). They say we won’t need copywriters, novelists, lawyers, film directors or any number of professions any more.

Yet there’s one question that the AI advocates don’t seem to be asking much:

Do people actually want to drink from a stagnant pool?