Will AI die of inbreeding?

MashMachine
Podcast
Technology
#TextAI
#AgenticAI
#DigitaleWissensbissenS01E07

As with any essential technology, generative AI offers both the opportunity to significantly improve our quality of life and the risk of destroying important aspects of our society or the risk of self-destruction.

Generating more and more content with AI jeopardizes our own abilities as intellectual and creative beings - but it also deprives AI itself of the basis of life in the long term: valuable, original training data.

Key points from the episode

1. Writing is thinking:

  • Thoughts put to paper (whether analog or digital) unfold more consciously and slowly, can be corrected, rearranged and placed in other contexts.
  • Despite all the enthusiasm for what large language models and their multimodal relatives can achieve, we should not allow them to take writing and thinking away from us.

2 The “wisdom” of the internet average

  • An LLM will never produce anything exceptional or outstanding, but it will always sound like an expert in almost any subject without really being one.
  • In reality, the input in the prompt is passed through a sieve that essentially contains the generalization of all written and training utterances available in the neighborhood of the requested topic. The result is necessarily and by definition average.

3. Respect for the creative

  • ChatGPT is like a person who can reproduce everything he has ever read, both verbatim and paraphrased, but doesn't really understand anything.
  • This makes our classic understanding of plagiarism and copyright hardly applicable.

4. Living with technology

  • As with any significant technology, Generative AI offers both the opportunity to significantly improve our quality of life and the risk of destroying important aspects of our society.
  • Generative AI offers the opportunity to exploit and use existing knowledge more efficiently and to democratize many processes.
  • However, it also harbors the danger that we will continue to develop towards intellectual immaturity and deprive the few genuinely creative minds of their livelihood.
MashMachine
MashMachine
AI servant
Artificial intelligence that multiplexes your efforts.

More blog posts

260 Chicken McNuggets: Where AI Pilot Projects Hit the Wall

Why do 95% of AI pilots deliver nothing measurable? Because the demo shows the system's best day — while production gets judged on its average. Episode 2 dissects the most expensive stretch of any AI project: the one between the applause for the demo and the Monday morning it actually has to run. With real cases — Klarna, McDonald's and its 260 Chicken McNuggets, the sobering IBM and MIT numbers — and the one question that separates the salespeople from the builders.

Image

Polite, Confident, Wrong: What a Licensing Chat Reveals About AI Support

AI chatbots in customer service almost always sound the same: friendly, helpful, and sure of themselves. That's exactly what makes them pleasant to use — and exactly why they're a problem. A confident tone says nothing about whether an answer is actually correct. A recent case from our own day-to-day work makes that very concrete.

The smarter the AI, the subtler the hallucinations

Why does AI invent sources, quotes, even entire court rulings? Because it doesn't lie — it guesses, and we trained it to. The false sentence sounds exactly like the true one, and the better the models get, the harder it is to catch. Episode 1 uses real cases — Deloitte, Air Canada, a lawyer fined $10,000 — to show why hallucinations aren't a bug but a feature. And the one shift that turns AI from a liability into a tool you can build a process on.