{"id":152162,"date":"2025-10-30T12:57:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T17:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/insights\/blog\/none\/is-ai-eating-itself-what-model-collapse-means-for-your-marketing\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T16:22:57","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T21:22:57","slug":"is-ai-eating-itself-what-model-collapse-means-for-your-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/paid-media\/is-ai-eating-itself-what-model-collapse-means-for-your-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Is AI eating itself? What \u201cmodel collapse\u201d means for your marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We all see AI everywhere in our work. It helps us write emails, create ads, and understand our customers. It is very powerful and getting more powerful by the second. But there is a big problem that not many people are talking about, and it\u2019s a risk that could make our best AI tools much less effective, maybe even useless. This problem has a technical name: model collapse<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what is this model collapse, you ask? Imagine you have a beautiful photo. You make a copy of it with a copy machine. The copy looks good, almost perfect. Now, imagine you take that copy and make another copy from it. And then you copy that copy. Each time, the picture gets a little worse. It becomes blurry. The colors are not right. After many copies, you cannot even see what the original photo was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what is happening to AI. We\u2019re currently only at the fifth copy, so the effect is not yet fully perceptible, but it is<\/em> happening, and some say it is inevitable.<\/p>\n\n\n

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AI models like ChatGPT learn by reading huge amounts of information from the internet. At first, this was all information created by people. But now, the internet is full of content created by other AIs. One study suggested that about 57% of all web text has been generated or translated by an AI<\/a>. That figure comes from a one-year-old article, so it is safe to assume that the figure is probably even higher today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, new AI models are learning from the “copies” made by older AI models. Just like the photo, the quality gets worse with each new copy. The AI starts to forget the details. It starts to make mistakes.This is model collapse. It is like the AI is eating its own tail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How model collapse will impact marketers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Why should you, a marketer, care about this? Because this problem will affect our work directly, and very soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, think about Google Search. Google is now using AI to give answers right on the search page. They call it AI Overviews<\/a>. This AI needs authentic, accurate information from the web to work well. But what happens when the web is full of low quality, AI generated content? AI Overviews will start giving bad answers. They will show wrong information. They will repeat the same boring ideas. People will stop trusting Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For marketers, this is a big problem. If people cannot find our websites, our traffic will go down. Studies already show that when an AI answer appears, very few people click on the links to websites. One analysis found a site could lose about 79% of its traffic for a query if the results appear below an AI overview<\/a>. This is a serious threat to SEO and content marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, think about our paid advertising. Many of us use programmatic advertising to show our ads to the right people. But cheap AI content has created thousands of fake websites, sometimes referred to as “made for advertising” or MFA sites. They are full of bad articles and way too many ads. One report found that 15% of programmatic ad spending goes to these low-quality sites<\/a>.Our ads are showing on these terrible websites, and we are wasting part of our budgets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, criminals are using AI to commit ad fraud<\/a>. They create fake people, fake clicks, and fake engagement. It is becoming harder to know if our ads are being seen by real customers. Model collapse makes this worse because the AI we use to target ads also learns from bad data, so it creates a loop of bad decision making.<\/p>\n

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