Generative AI and LLMs potentially collapse due to the exhaustion of organic data and the increasing reliance on synthetic data. Synthetic data, generated by AI models, can cause a degenerative process known as model collapse, where the AI model's performance progressively degrades over time, eventually becoming useless.
AI using synthetic data, they will fall into the same trap as everyone else. They must carefully preserve their original data source and avoid using additional synthetic data in their training.
This raises questions about the provenance of content crawled from the Internet. It is crucial to distinguish between data generated by LLMs and other data. One option is for the AI community to coordinate and share information needed to resolve questions of provenance. Otherwise, it may become increasingly difficult to train newer versions of LLMs without access to pre-polluted data or direct access to data generated by humans at scale.
In conclusion, the potential for model collapse in generative AI and large language models due to the use of synthetic data is a significant concern. While synthetic data may seem like a solution to the exhaustion of organic data, it could lead to a degenerative process that causes models to forget the true underlying data distribution. This process may be inevitable and could result in a collapse of the model. To avoid this outcome, it is essential to preserve the original data source and avoid using additional synthetic data in training.
Based on the information provided, here are some key points about the ongoing debate regarding the potential collapse of generative AI and large language models (LLMs):