Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original. Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct. After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post, “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with bla...