In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, biased or poor quality (“garbage”) information or input produces a result or output of similar (“garbage”) quality. The adage points to the need to improve data quality in, for example, programming.

There was some research article applying this 70s computer science concept to LLMs. It was published in Nature and hit major news outlets. Basically they further trained GPT on its output for a couple generations, until the model degraded terribly. Sounded obvious to me, but seeing it happen on the www is painful nonetheless…