DRIFT FACTORY AI

What is model collapse?

AI image models don't copy — they interpret. Each pass compresses the image into an abstract mathematical space, then re-imagines it from that compressed meaning. Like a game of telephone, but visual. Over a hundred rounds, the original message is gone — but what's left is the model's accent.

The image doesn't shatter into noise. It erodes into something coherent but alien — the model's own "attractor," a stable pattern it converges toward regardless of where it started. Text dies first. Faces survive longest. Every model finds a different fixed point. The degradation is the model's autobiography.

Artists have been making beauty from broken signals for 50 years — Alvin Lucier dissolving his voice into room resonance, William Basinski recording tape eating itself, VHS bootlegs building an entire aesthetic from generational loss. We're continuing the lineage with a new machine.