AI Is Running Out of Internet, and It's Starting to Eat Itself

The web gave language models their first picture of humanity. The next generation increasingly risks being trained on a copy of a copy of that picture, and every copy leaves something behind.

In 1969, the American composer Alvin Lucier sat down inside a room with a microphone, a loudspeaker, and a deceptively simple idea about what would happen if a recording were forced to keep listening to itself.

He read a short prepared text into the microphone and recorded his voice on tape. Then he played that recording back into the same room, captured the playback as a new recording, and repeated the process again and again, with each generation becoming the source material for the one that followed.

At first, Lucier was still unmistakably there. You could hear the pace of his speech, the words he’d chosen, and the particular hesitations in the voice that produced them. But the...

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