And with the constant improvements, this number is only set to grow.

It isn't going to constantly improve, though. We're facing model collapse, and nobody has a solution for this problem.

As more and more AI-generated content floods the public internet, more and more of that content will end up as training data for AI. Exacerbating this, quality publications are largely blocking AI bots, for entirely understandable reasons, which means less, and less higher-quality content is being used to train the next generation of models.

For example, researchers have noted that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and many other models, already contains synthetic images created by earlier AI models. This is the equivalent of a child learning to draw solely by copying the images made by younger children – not a scenario which is likely to improve quality.

In fact, researchers already have a name for the inevitable bad outcome: “model collapse”. In this case, the content generated by AI’s stops improving, and starts to get worse.