Recursion is a beautiful concept when used correctly, and a catastrophic one when used without a base condition. In 2026, the artificial intelligence industry has collectively written a recursive function that is rapidly consuming the world's data stack.
Model Collapse
The first generation of LLMs were trained on human data. They had a rich, diverse, and fundamentally flawed but authentic dataset to draw from. But as AI-generated text flooded the internet, the next generation of models began training on the output of their predecessors.
This phenomenon, known as "Model Collapse," is the digital equivalent of making a photocopy of a photocopy. With each iteration, the nuances of human expression are smoothed out, anomalies are discarded, and the resulting output becomes an eerie, homogenous sludge of average probabilities.
Stack Overflow in Real Life
We are stuck in an infinite loop. The AI writes a blog post; another AI reads it to train; a developer uses that AI to generate code; the code is pushed to GitHub; another AI scrapes GitHub to learn how to code.
Where is the base case? Where does the original thought enter the system? Unless we find a reliable way to differentiate human entropy from machine probability, civilization's digital record will crash hard, leaving behind nothing but a stack trace tracing back to ourselves.