What if Prompt-Based AI is Simply Becoming Dumber? - The Fable of The Clever Little Snake

An artistic research fable that articulates how Prompt-Based AI is affected by a model collapse emerging from “AI autophagy” (Xing, X., et al., 2025) at it’s design core, where “the data they generate end up polluting the training set of the next generation.” (Shumailov, I. , et al., 2024).

The fable raises questions such as asking if Prompt-Based AI already operates inside a New Autocoprophagic Digital Space leading to Internet Collapse. A ”Technofeudalist” (Varoufakis, 2023) economical night-mare scenario before their already delayed Initial Public Offering.

REFERENCES

• Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. (2024) AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631, 755–759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

• Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Random House.

• Xing, X., Shi, F., Huang, J. et al. (2025). On the caveats of AI autophagy. Nat Mach Intell 7, 172–180. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-00984-1