I am so tired of opening my code editor and seeing the same AI-generated dashboard. Same layout. Same gradient. Same components. It all looks like it came out of the same broken photocopier.
Here is what is actually going on.
Models trained on AI output degrade over time. Researchers call it model collapse. Every generation trained on synthetic data gets slightly worse than the last. Diversity drops. The weird, specific, human stuff disappears. Everything drifts toward a boring average.
By April 2025, over 74% of newly created webpages had AI-generated text in them. Stack Overflow drowned in AI answers overnight. Content farms switched to pure synthetic output the moment it became cheap enough.
The web is now mostly a mirror reflecting a mirror.
So what are OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic doing about it? They are going back to the old internet. Pre-2022. Before the flood. Google signed a $60 million per year deal with Reddit just to access your old posts. OpenAI did the same. Anthropic got sued for taking it without asking.
Your decade-old forum arguments and niche shitposts are now formally worth more than anything being written today. That is not an exaggeration. That is a business decision backed by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Every boilerplate component you copy from an AI, every SEO article generated in bulk, every "here is a step by step guide" that reads like nothing, is feeding a loop that makes the whole thing worse.
I do not have a clean solution to pitch at the end of this. I am just a developer who is bored and annoyed that genuine human output has become the scarce resource in a world drowning in content.
Write something real. Even if it is ugly.
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