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Comment by frozenseven | Hacker News Reader

Cool. Then don't use LLMs and keep waiting for that prophesied "model collapse" to happen. See how that works out for you.

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I'm more worried about the collapse of humanity a la idocracy. The model collapse might just be secondary. Even just conversing on HN, that's the vibe I feel we're headed towards. Or, perhaps, I'm just running into more and more posters that have financial ties to the success of LLMs.

Model collapse is an induced phenomenon, not something you'll ever see in practice. Of course naive predictions of an impending 'collapse' go back to at least GPT-3 (that's over 6 years ago), yet models continue to get smarter. And speaking of predictions, I assume you've been saying that AI is "fake" for just as long?

I use AI for coding regularly. It's not fake. Just most aspects outside of the coding are looking to be a net negative on humanity if we think comprehensive and critical thinking are positive aspects of the human condition.

How do you see a possibility of avoiding model collapse? It seems to me to be an unavoidable consequence of two facts I consider pretty much irrefutable:

1) LLM content can at best be as good as the source material it was trained on. That's the upper bound. "Out of distribution" output of LLMs is mostly unusable.

2) LLM-generated content increasingly drowns out original content, online and elsewhere.

This spells "monotonically decreasing content quality" to me.

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