“Model collapse” shows AI doesn’t have the human touch, writer says
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
AI chatbots have gotten pretty good at generating text that looks like it was written by a real person. That’s because they’re trained on words and sentences that actual humans wrote, scraped from blogs and news websites. But research now shows when you feed that AI-generated text back into the models to train a new chatbot, after a while, it sort of stops making sense. It’s a phenomenon AI researchers are calling “model collapse.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Clive Thompson, author of “Coders” and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and Wired, about what could be a growing problem as more AI-generated stuff lands on the web.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The 2024 election is bound to be historic. |
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| 0:34.5 | Why the AI feedback loop could get ugly? |
| 0:38.3 | From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:41.1 | I'm Lily Jamali. |
| 0:52.1 | Chatbots like ChatGPT have gotten pretty good at generating text that looks like it was |
| 0:57.5 | written by a real person. |
| 0:59.4 | That's because they're trained on words and sentences that actual humans did right. |
| 1:05.2 | They've pulled all that prose from blogs and news sites. |
| 1:08.4 | But when you feed that AI-generated text back into the models that train a chatbot after |
| 1:14.2 | a while, it can kind of stop making sense. |
| 1:17.4 | AI researchers have a term for that. |
| 1:19.8 | It's called model collapse. |
| 1:21.7 | Clive Thompson, author of the book, Coters in Contributing Writer for the New York Times |
| 1:26.0 | Magazine and Wired, says that could be a problem. |
| 1:30.1 | Is more AI-generated stuff lands on the web? |
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