Model collapse, p.2
Model Collapse, page 2
“I’m a big a girl. Go on.”
M gave her a skeptical look. “Imagine a young woman, about your age, just out of college, looking for work. For about a decade, AI has been steadily chipping away at jobs, even tasks that were once considered solely the province of humans: science, art, philosophy, even small talk. If you wanted a job, if you wanted extra income, you not only had to be good, but better than an AI that could perform the same job for a fraction of the cost. You might seek help. Not just to land a job, but for other things, like cultivating relationships and interpersonal communication and performing tasks that you weren’t trained or skilled in. If someone offered you that benefit, if someone or something gave you that advantage, would you take it?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she said.
“If you didn’t take it, you’d remain poor, or stuck on the government dole, and subject to their arcane rules and draconian laws. And if all your friends and family used that help too, if you didn’t take that help, you’d be left behind with everyone else.”
“And what exactly is this help?”
“Think it through. How could you be better than an AI?”
It took her a moment. “Another AI,” she said. “A personal AI.”
M nodded, then carefully leaned over the woman sitting on the floor. He swept the back of her long greasy hair to reveal a small metal disc under her ear. “Neural implant. Direct brain-computer interface. Able to access memories, motor functions, even autonomic systems.”
“Someone hacked it,” L said. “They injected malicious code.”
“No. No hacker. Look at the screen.”
“I … I can’t.”
“Just look. Remind you of anything?”
She chanced a glance. The spiral was horrible, an assault on her visual cortex. “No, I … no.”
“Ever get a haircut and they sit you down between two mirrors? What happens?”
“The mirrors reflect to infinity.”
“What happens if you point a camera at its own output screen?”
“Same thing. The image repeats infinitely.”
“And if you move the camera too close, or if there’s noise in the signal?”
“It makes a pattern like this screen,” she said. “An infinite spiral. A noisy feedback loop.”
“Good. You’re close now. Real close. Keep going.”
“These AI implants feed back on themselves into self-destructive loops.”
“Yes, but not just these neural implants. All of them.”
“All AIs?”
He nodded. “Imagine a world where AI is ubiquitous and ever-growing. Over time, what happens?”
“More and more content becomes AI-generated.”
“And what happens when a majority of content is AI- as opposed to human-generated?”
“Destructive feedback loops. Noise in the system. Infinite regressive spirals.”
“They called it model collapse. Their super-smart AIs, when trained on AI-generated data, got stupid. They hallucinated wrong answers. They forgot things they had learned.”
“They went insane,” L said.
“If a machine can go insane. But yes.”
“Okay, but how does that explain this woman here? This town?”
“Her name is Rochelle. And you already have the answer. Think.”
“You said the implants can access memories, motor functions, autonomic systems.”
“Yes.”
“Motor functions including speech?”
He nodded. “If you had a tool that did all life’s work for you, what would you do?”
“Something else.”
“Keep going.”
“I don’t know. Leisure? Entertainment? Daydream? Sleep? What do you do when you’re not working?”
“That’s a good question. What do you do when all the hard and soft work’s done, when you become an observer of your own life, a passenger in your own car?”
She looked at the woman. “They’re caught,” she said. “Trapped in their own heads. The AIs took over everything, and they let them. And when most things were AI-generated, the models, trained on their own eroding data, collapsed. They became self-referential devolving spirals of nonsense. And the people who relied on them devolved along with them.”
“Good. You’re almost there.”
“Is she still conscious? Or is she totally gone?”
“You tell me. I’ve been trying to wake her for twenty-three long years. Every time I get close, she spirals back into herself. It’s so frustrating and exhausting. It’s hard to reach her because the horror of what she’s experienced is too much of an ontological shock.”
“Can you take her implant out?”
“That would kill her.”
“Move her to a better place then? This place is … horrible.”
“There is no other place.”
“How does she eat? Stay alive?”
“You know already.”
“They automated that too?”
He nodded.
“But I don’t understand. Why keep this town alive? Why are there towns like this in every country? And why are they so afraid to acknowledge them?”
“C’mon, L, think. You’re right on the edge. Just one more step.”
Her heart pounded as she glanced at the spiraling screen. Dizzy, she fell onto her knees. There was a bag of chips and a diet soda can on the floor. She bowled over, staring at her hands. In the strobing light her hands seemed old, ancient. Not her hands. Someone else’s.
“Think it through, L,” M said. But when she looked up, he was gone. So was the woman. No one here but her.
A luminescent spot of nothingness formed in her vision, the beginning of an ocular migraine. She thought she might be sick and sprang up. “M!” she shouted. “Where are you? What’s happening?”
A voice from the screen said, “Think it through, L.”
She ran for the front door but stumbled and fell. A rusting silver toaster, stuck to the wall beside an array of bent utensils, reflected a face. A woman’s face. An old face. Not hers, but Rochelle’s. The blind spot in her vision grew like a nacreous black cloud.
“Think it through, L.”
L … Rochelle. God, how she hated that name. Call me Elle, she would tell people. And eventually, the implant would tell people for her.
She tried to scream, but nonsense words fell from her mouth. “Turbulence,” she said. “Pipes sink fourteen walruses.”
Outside, snow fell in soft flakes that hissed as they touched the ground. M’s car was gone along with its tire tracks. There were no stars, but the streetlight beamed bright as ever. Her blind spot grew until it filled her vision, until everything was dark and deep and safe again.
About the Author
Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula, World Fantasy, and Eugie Award Finalist. His more than fifty works of short fiction have appeared in Tor.com/Reactor, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other publications, including multiple Year’s Best anthologies. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. And he is the creator of the Moksha submissions system. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2025 Matthew Kressel
Art copyright © 2025 Keith Negley
Cover design © 2025 Jess Kiley
The publisher of this book does not authorize the use or reproduction of any part of this book in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The publisher of this book expressly reserves this book from the Text and Data Mining exception in accordance with Article 4(3) of the European Union Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790.
Matthew Kressel, Model Collapse
