You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

The Nashville Zoo has launched a public campaign to block construction of a proposed 69,000-square-foot AI data center that would sit directly adjacent to habitats for endangered animals, including vulnerable clouded leopards. Zoo officials warn that the facility’s constant noise, bright artificial lighting, and electrical hum could seriously disrupt animal behavior, stress levels, and long-established breeding programs. The zoo is home to more than 3,700 animals representing over 350 species and maintains one of the most important collections of rare and endangered wildlife in the United States. This conflict highlights a growing backlash against the rapid expansion of data centers driven by the AI boom. These facilities require massive amounts of electricity and operate 24 hours a day, prompting communities nationwide to raise concerns about energy consumption, water use, noise pollution, and environmental impacts. Wildlife conservation groups are now joining the resistance. More than 180,000 people have already signed a petition opposing the project. The developer behind the data center states that it will use waterless cooling systems, meet all local noise regulations, and comply with environmental standards. However, zoo leaders argue that the location itself, immediately next to sensitive animal habitats, makes the project unacceptable regardless of technical mitigations. The dispute underscores a broader challenge of the AI era: how to build the vast digital infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence without placing undue pressure on local communities, ecosystems, and wildlife.

Today, I signed an Executive Order temporarily repealing bedtimes in the City of New York so that kids of all ages can watch our team in the NBA Finals. As Mayor, you’re forced to make many difficult decisions. This was not one of them. Go Knicks.

At university graduation ceremonies this spring, commencement speakers have been getting booed for championing AI, given how the technology might threaten their job prospects. In a commencement speech at Bard College last week, I delivered a more hopeful message — that humans can do essential things that computers simply can’t. Here are some highlights from that speech:

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

The yellow in Vincent van Gogh's paintings