Without new text to train on, AI’s recent hot streak could come to a premature end, Ross Andersen writes. ⁠ ⁠ The current methods for educating AI suggest a promising way forward for the technology’s development: Just shovel ever-larger amounts of human-created text into its maw, and wait for wondrous new skills to manifest, Andersen writes. The trouble is that good prose ranks among the most difficult things to produce in the known universe, and for AI, not any old text will do: Large language models trained on books are much better writers than those trained on huge batches of social-media posts. A team of researchers led by Pablo Villalobos at Epoch AI recently predicted that programs will run out of high-quality reading material by 2027.” ⁠ ⁠ “Random text scraped from the internet generally doesn’t make for good training data, with Wikipedia articles being a notable exception,” Andersen continues at the link in our bio. “But perhaps future algorithms will allow AIs to wring sense from our aggregated tweets, Instagram captions, and Facebook statuses. Even so, these low-quality sources won’t be inexhaustible. According to Villalobos, within a few decades, speed-reading AIs will be powerful enough to ingest hundreds of trillions of words—including all those that human beings have so far stuffed into the web.” To increase human cultural production for AI, we may have to get creative. Villalobos mentioned “synthetic” training data created by AIs. In this scenario, large language models would be like the proverbial monkeys with typewriters, only smarter and possessed of functionally infinite energy. Another method could be wearing dongles around our necks that record our every speech act. According to one estimate, people speak 5,000 to 20,000 words a day on average. Across 8 billion people, those pile up quickly. If “our data-gorging AIs do someday surpass human cognition, we will have to console ourselves with the fact that they are made in our image. AIs are not aliens. They are not the exotic other ... They have seen the sun setting on its oceans billions of times. They know our oldest stories.”