This is the natural conclusion of what was really claimed about model collapse, and indeed natural evolution. Making an imperfect copy while invoking a selection mechanism is evolution.

Some of the claims about models training on their own data, in their enthusiasm to frame it as a failure, went further to suggest that it magnified biases. I had my doubts about their conclusions. If it were true, it would be a much greater breakthrough because the ability to magnify a property represents a way to measure a weak version that property. The ability to do that would mean they would have found a way to provide a training signal to avoid bias. It would be great if that's what they did but I suspect there would have been more news about it.

Perhaps this paper will put to rest the notion that AI output is useless as training data. It has only ever been the case that it was useless as an indiscriminate source of data.