Recursion into madness

I don’t write about generative AI much. Everyone else does; not much of consequence ever gets said. I think the technology is great where it helps us automate mundane tasks, cancerous where it undermines genuine human expression, and darkly funny where the two worlds collide.As a security person, though, I want to know how the models fail. They’re human-shaped but inhuman; they beg to be anthropomorphized and then choke on a seahorse emoji. Recursive processes where AI feeds on its own output are of special interest. Pragmatically, they’re the core mechanic of agent loops; more abstractly, they’re a major theme in the doomsday predictions of AI skeptics (model collapse) and the believers in the coming AI god (rapid self-improvement).And you better believe that recursion is fun! Here’s a quick video I put together by asking Nano Banana 2 to generate a faux movie poster and then asking it to repeatedly make a localized edit to the title:This effect is the bane of AI-based image and…