Epistemic decay: Generative artificial intelligence and the recombination of culture

Amankwah-Amoah J Abdalla S Mogaji E , et al. (2024) The impending disruption of creative industries by generative AI: opportunities, challenges, and research agenda. International Journal of Information Management 79: 102759.

Bender S (2025) Generative-AI, the media industries, and the disappearance of human creative labour. Media Practice and Education 26(2): 200–217.

Habermas J Lennox S Lennox F (1974) The public sphere: an encyclopedia article (1964). New German Critique (3): 49–55, Originally published in Fischer-Lexikon Staat und Politik, Frankfurt am Main, 1964. https://psi412.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Habermas,20Public20Sphere20(1974).pdf

Kobak D González-Márquez R Horvát E-Á , et al. (2025) Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary. Science Advances 11(27): eadt3813. (Accessed 1 Aug 2025).

Laizure SC (2024) Caution: ChatGPT doesn’t know what you are asking and doesn’t know what it is saying. Journal of Pediatric Pharmacology and Therapeutics: JPPT: the Official Journal of PPAG 29(5): 558–560, Available at. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11472406/ (Accessed 1 Aug 2025).

Law R Guan X Soulo T (2025) 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages). Ahrefs Blog. Available at. https://ahrefs.com/blog/what-percentage-of-new-content-is-ai-generated/ (Accessed 1 Aug 2025).

Laybats C Tredinnick L (2024) Ethics and artificial intelligence–the rise of the deep fake. Business Information Review 41(2): 46–47.

OpenAI . (2024) Understanding the source of what we see and hear online. 7 May 2024 (updated 4 August 2024). Available at: https://openai.com/index/understanding-the-source-of-what-we-see-and-hear-online/ (Accessed: 9 August 2025).

Shanahan M (2015) The Technological Singularity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shumailov I Shumaylov Z Zhao Y , et al. (2024) AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631(8022): 755–759.

Surowiecki J. (2004) The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few. Little, Brown.

Thompson B Dhaliwal MP Frisch P , et al. (2024) A shocking amount of the web is machine translated: insights from multi-way parallelism. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05749 [cs.CL], revised June 5 2024. Available at. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05749 (Accessed 1 Aug 2025).

Tredinnick L (2017) Artificial intelligence and professional roles. Business Information Review 34(1): 37–41.

Tredinnick Luke (2023) Dangerous data: analytics and information behaviour in the commercial world. Business Information Review 40(1): 10–20.

Tredinnick Luke Laybats Claire (2017) Evaluating digital sources: trust, truth and lies. Business Information Review 34(4): 172–174.

Tredinnick Luke Laybats Claire (2019) Reality filters: Disinformation and fake news. Business Information Review 36(3): 92–94.