I recall that AI trained on AI output over many cycles eventually becomes something akin to noise texture as the output degrades rapidly.

Won’t most AI produced content put out into the public be human curated, thus heavily mitigating this degradation effect? If we’re going to see a full length AI generated movie it seems like humans will be heavily involved, hand holding the output and throwing out the AI’s nonsense.

Some will be heavily curated, by those who care about quality. This is a lot slower to produce, requires some expertise to do right, so there will be far less of it

The vast majority of content will be (is) the fastest and easiest to create - AI slop

The default Llama 4 system prompt even instructs it to avoid using various ChatGPT-isms, presumably because they've already scraped so much GPT-generated material that it noticably skews their models output.

There might be a plateau coming but I’m not sure that will be the reason.

It seems counterintuitive but there is some research suggesting that using synthetic data might actually be productive.

I think there's probably a distinction to be made between deliberate, careful use of synthetic data, as opposed to blindly scraping 1PB of LLM generated SEO spam and force-feeding it into a new model. Maybe the former is useful, but the latter... probably not.

Yes indeed some studies were already done on this.