Generative AI was trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans.
But scientists and critics have wondered what would happen once AI became widely adopted and started training on its outputs.
A new study points to some answers.
In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomously – generating and interpreting their own outputs without human intervention.
The researchers linked a text-to-image system with an image-to-text system and let them iterate – image, caption, image, caption – over and over and over.
