When academic Jathan Sadowski reached for an analogy last year to describe how AI programs decay, he landed on the term “Habsburg AI”.
The Habsburgs were one of Europe’s most powerful royal houses, but entire sections of their family line collapsed after centuries of inbreeding.
Recent studies have shown how AI programs underpinning products like ChatGPT go through a similar collapse when they are repeatedly fed their own data.
“I think the term Habsburg AI has aged very well,” Sadowski told AFP, saying his coinage had “only become more relevant for how we think about AI systems”.
The ultimate concern is that AI-generated content could take over the web, which could in turn render chatbots and image generators useless and throw a trillion-dollar industry into a tailspin.
But other experts argue that the problem is overstated, or can be fixed.
And many companies are enthusiastic about using what they call …