| Title | David Rosenthal on the LLM Negative Feedback Loop | |
| Date | Monday July 06, @11:04PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the ouroboros-of-shit dept. | ||
Archivist David Rosenthal observes now that more material is posted online by LLMs than actual people, the bots are starting to ingest their own digital excrement, creating a negative feedback loop.
In the belief that "more is better", Large Language Models (LLMs) have insatiable appetites for training data. They started by scraping everything on the Web (robots.txt be dammed). When that ran out they downloaded the various pirate libraries (copyright be dammed). That exhausted the texts easily available in digital form, but their hunger wasn't assuaged. As for images, they partly used CAPTCHAs but mostly paid vast numbers of poor people to label the images with what they showed.
When the supply of text ran low, people observed that the LLMs were capable of generating human-like text in large quantities. The obvious idea was to pour the output of the LLMs into their training sets. This wasn't just a conscious decision, it was inevitable. The advent of LLMs rapidly polluted the Web with LLM output. Greg Druck's AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans notes that:
We observe significant growth in primarily AI-generated articles, coinciding with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. After only 12 months, primarily AI-generated articles accounted for 35.9% of articles published.
In Q1 2025, the quantity of primarily AI-generated articles being published on the web nearly equaled the quantity of human-written articles, 49.6% vs. 50.4%. In Q4 2025, primarily AI-generated articles surpassed human-written at 50.9%, before returning to 49.9% in Q1 2026.
Even if slop were not of undesirable quality, it is not produced by humans and thus is completely unsuitable as training data.
Previously:
(2026) A Wikipedia Clone Built on AI Hallucinations is Here to Hasten Along the Death of the Internet
(2025) When It All Comes Crashing Down: The Aftermath of the AI Boom
(2025) AI Favors Texts Written by Other AIs, Even When They're Worse Than Human Ones
(2025) What the Hell is Going on Right Now?
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printed from SoylentNews, David Rosenthal on the LLM Negative Feedback Loop on 2026-07-13 06:59:14