Beneath Meta AI’s inviting exterior lies a crucial distinction that transforms the chatbot into a sophisticated data harvesting tool.

In dusty factories, cramped internet cafes and makeshift home offices around the world, millions of people sit at computers tediously labelling data. These workers are the lifeblood of the burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

Artificial intelligence (AI) prophets and newsmongers are forecasting the end of the generative AI hype, with talk of an impending catastrophic “model collapse”. But how realistic are these predictions? And what is model collapse anyway?