AI Companies Are Paying Millions for Your Old Reddit Posts. Here's Why That Should Concern You.

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.