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Goo-goo ga-ga
Will you fall for this illusion?
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OVERWORLD:
-What is “Model Collapse”? And will it hurt AI?-
ONE BETWEEN:
-A secret Andy Warhol piece has been uncovered, and is for sale.-
THE DEPTHS:
-Will you fall for this illusion?-
 | O |  |
Are they doing it wrong?
What is “Model Collapse”? And will it hurt AI?
If you've been paying any type of attention to tech, you know that shitting on AI is the new wave.
It’s not just Wall Street pulling its money — some AI researchers say these giant models with huge datasets are dead wrong.
The AI game is as follows: large amounts of data = performance beyond hooman capacity. A pretty serious research paper claims the opposite:
The papers are in: Published in Nature in July, the paper pretty much says that training AI models on data containing AI-generated content leads to deteriorated performance, a phenomenon known as “model collapse.”
Falling apart: Sure, these datasets allow AI to generate highly relevant responses. But experts worry that training these models on AI-generated content will cause them to become less accurate and eventually “collapse.”
Self-posioning: Another 2023 paper on model collapse demonstrated that AI-generated images of humans became distorted after the model re-trained on its own creations. Researchers compared this to an AI system being “poisoned” by its own output.
Goo-goo ga-ga:The new Nature paper, released by Oxford and Cambridge resarchers, also found that AI models trained with AI-generated content produced nonsensical outcomes. Errors from one model amplified in the next, moving the AI further from reality until prompts yielded gibberish.
The paper tried this in different ways. One example showed a prompt about historic British architecture resulting in a bullshit discussion about jackrabbits when inputted into a re-trained LLM.
Basically, the model gets stuck in an echo chamber of its own thoughts and goes coo-coo, much like a human would if you told it to learn from its own thoughts.
While model collapse remains theoretical, the Nature paper claims that future AI models will likely train on data produced by earlier AI systems.
This could complicate the use of synthetic data created by generative AI, which tech companies use to avoid legal and ethical issues associated with scraping web data. The prospect of model collapse could disrupt these plans.
It’s a real problem because high-quality, human-generated data, is getting costly. So AI companies are incentivized to find a way to train AI with AI. OpenAI, for example, has spent millions partnering with publishers to license content for training — ideally, they want to stop doing so.
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✦Business & Tech✦
Damn right: A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by monopolizing search and advertising markets. Google plans to appeal. The decision is significant for future tech monopoly cases and highlights Google's dominant market position and exclusionary practices with major partners like Apple.
Also: Google is ending Chromecast production after 11 years, shifting focus to AI, entertainment, and smart homes with the new Google TV Streamer. Support and updates will continue for existing Chromecasts.
Illuminati: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sold a record $322.7M in shares in July, totaling almost $500M with June sales... just before the giant market crash this Monday. Whatever.
Again: OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving for Anthropic, an AI startup backed by Amazon. If you remember, other leaders like Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, also left earlier this year — which is suspicious.
✦Fashion & Culture✦
Rumor: Snoop Dogg is reportedly making $500,000 per day at the Paris Olympics, potentially earning $8 million over 16 days.
Donald Trump urged supporters to avoid Google, calling it "illegitimate" and alleging interference with his information. He discussed this on Adin Ross’s stream, which reached 564,000 viewers on Kick.com.
Fuck: The R-rated Marvel film "Deadpool & Wolverine" features the F-word over 100 times. Language experts note its increased public usage and reduced taboo status. Audiences still embraced the film, grossing $824 million globally.
✦Hmm… Interesting✦
Cozy 2-minute-read: Who Wrote the Blue Screens of Death
Very good 5-minute read: Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Huge, mind-blowing article: Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From
ONE
BETWEEN
Hot shit
A secret Andy Warhol piece has been uncovered, and is for sale.
After 39 years, Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art has been found and is now for sale. If you didn't know, in 1985, Commodore hired Andy Warhol to show off the artistic capabilities of their new Amiga 1000 computer.
Lost artifact: Back then, Warhol created several digital images, including a famous portrait of Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie. These pictures have never been seen, ever.
No trace: Debbie Harry mentioned in her autobiography that she had a copy of these images and only one other person did, though she didn’t name the individual.
Debbie couldn't gatekeep forever though. In July 2024, that anonymous individual revealed the art. Former Commodore engineer Jeff Bruette revealed that he owns a print of the Debbie Harry image and a signed floppy disk containing eight images created by Warhol at the event.
Bruette had them on display in his home for nearly 39 years. Besides being a technician, Bruette was a long-time Commodore employee, having programmed two popular early Commodore 64 games, Gorf and Wizard of Wor. He also managed the graphics software Warhol used.
Warhol’s digital images, by today’s standards, are technically basic -- which is the cool part. They were created with a maximum resolution of 640 by 400 pixels and only 32 colors at a time out of a palette of 4,096.
Actually, Warhol’s demonstration didn’t go that well. The Debbie Harry image came from a rehearsal, not the live event, as his attempts during the demonstration didn’t produce the desired results. The image is still charming though.
THE DEPTHS
Why is this a thing?
Will you fall for this illusion?
Have you heard of the "Thatcher Illusion"?
It was first discovered by psychologist Peter Thompson in 1980. Named after former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the illusion teaches us some pretty interesting things about facial perception and processing in the human brain.
The idea: In a Thatcher Illusion, it's difficult to detect changes in facial features when a face is upside down, even though these changes are obvious when the face is upright.
Why is this? Our brains are wired to process faces holistically. We recognize faces by their overall arrangement rather than individual features.
When a face is upside down, our ability the full information disrupts. So, we fail to notice the funky features. It's only when the face is upright that the brain detects how fucked up the person looks.
Our visual system is complex; sophisticated but easily deceived. The Thatcher Illusion basically proves the brain's reliance on certain visual cues, and that orientation plays a crucial role in face recognition.
The Thatcher Illusion has implications beyond fun optical tricks. It informs research in psychology and neuroscience. Understanding how we perceive faces can help in areas like facial recognition technology and understanding visual disorders.
