What happens when ChatGPT starts to feed on its own writing?

A few years ago, when Gmail rolled out its autocomplete feature, the big worry was that having a bot finish our sentences would homogenize our emails.

We were so damn cute back then.

That worry looks almost trivial now that we’ve got “generative AI,” a suite of tools ranging from ChatGPT and GPT-4 to DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. These AI models don’t just finish our sentences; they can write an entire essay or create a whole portfolio of art in seconds. And they increase the old worry of homogenization by orders of magnitude.

I’m not just talking about concerns that AI will put writers or artists out of work. Nowadays, if you peer underneath the very real fears of “what if AI robs us humans of our jobs?” you can find a deeper anxiety: What if AI robs us humans of a capacity that’s core to our very humanness — our originality?

Here’s how some worry this might happen: Generative models like ChatGPT are trained on gobs and gobs of text from the internet — most of which, up until now, has been created by human beings.