Every The AI Downside article filed under AI Slop — the failures, dark patterns, price hikes and privacy grabs we've logged here, newest first. 4 and counting.
Feed a model enough of its own kind of output and it degrades — the rare cases vanish and everything drifts toward the average. It's called model collapse, it's peer-reviewed, and Pew now finds more than a third of post-ChatGPT web pages show signs of AI authorship. Here's the mechanism, the evidence, and why it should worry you as a user.
When a thousand companies build the same wrapper around the same three models, they converge on the same everything — including the same fragility.
AI launches have hardened into a genre with fixed conventions. Once you can see the template, you cannot unsee it.
AI support is sold as faster help for customers. Mostly it is cheaper deflection for companies, with the escape hatch quietly welded shut.
