Something quietly strange is happening in the world of AI. The models we’re building are getting smarter, sure, but they’re also eating more and more of their own output. Think about it: the Internet is drowning in AI-generated text , images, and code.  And that same content is being scraped to train the next wave of models. It’s a loop with no exit, and researchers have a name for what happens when you keep feeding a model its own reflections: model collapse. It sounds dramatic because it is. What actually is AI model collapse? Model collapse occurs when an AI model is trained on data that was itself generated by AI. By now, we’ve already lost the plot and come to terms with the fact that it’s often impossible to spot non-human content .  Over time, AI models lose touch with the diversity of the real world and converge on a narrower, blander version of reality.…