Like a snake eating its own tail: What happens when AI consumes its own data?

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In large language model collapse, there are generally three sources of errors: The model itself, the way the model is trained and the data — or lack thereof — that the model is trained on. Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

Asked ChatGPT anything lately? Talked with a customer service chatbot? Read the results of Google’s “AI Overviews” summary feature?

If you’ve used the Internet lately, chances are, you’ve been consuming content created by a large language model.

Large language models, like DeepSeek-R1 or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are kind of