The Degradation Spiral

The Degradation Spiral is the 'Broken Brain.' The AI's actual performance gets objectively worse over time—not just perceived quality, but real degradation. Causes include data drift (the world changes but training data doesn't), model collapse (training on AI-generated content), adversarial pollution (bad actors corrupting signals), or infrastructure decay (optimizations that sacrifice quality for cost). Users gradually lose confidence. They use the product less. Less usage means less feedback for improvement. The quality gap versus competitors widens. The tipping point: when user perception shifts from 'this sometimes makes mistakes' to 'this is fundamentally unreliable.'