The CrossFit community is coming to terms with the death of one of its competitors. Serbian CrossFitter Lazar Dukic, age 28, drowned on August 8 during the 800-meter swim portion of the CrossFit Games in Fort Worth, Texas. The games continued as scheduled, but in the aftermath of Dukic's death, many are wondering whether CrossFit needs big changes.

What did the commentators say?
The CrossFit Games "attracts global athletes widely regarded as being among the fittest people in the world," said CNN. "Extensive planning is involved with every CrossFit Games competition, including a documented safety plan with personnel on-site throughout the event," CrossFit CEO Don Faul said.

However, Dukic's death has "raised many concerns, some long-standing, about the safety of CrossFit as both a workout regimen and a high-level athletic competition," said Calum Marsh at The New York Times. The "ostensible purpose of the CrossFit Games is to test the fittest on Earth" with challenges including "heavy barbell snatches or bar muscle-ups," plus "leaping over hay bales, swinging a sledgehammer or tossing a medicine ball."

But "some top CrossFit athletes have said the Games push competitors too far, exceeding what's necessary to test fitness," said Marsh, and "questions about the safety of the competition quickly resurfaced after Mr. Dukic's death." Some people were concerned the event was held in the extreme heat of Texas in August, while others "wondered whether enough lifeguards had been on the scene."

It's a "tale as old as time in many sports, where those that hold the power and organize the events treat athletes as disposable," CrossFit athlete Brent Fikowski said at Men's Health. CrossFit doesn't "need to hurt us or put us through more than is necessary to sort us from first to last." 

What next?
The Professional Fitness Athletes' Association, an advocacy group for CrossFit athletes, has published a letter citing three demands for CrossFit to abide by. These include an "appropriate level of transparency" during CrossFit's investigation of Dukic's death and the resignation of CrossFit Games Director Dave Castro from the Games' Sport Team.

Artificial intelligence is focused on data largely taken from the internet. However, with the volume of data required to school AI, many models end up consuming other AI-generated data, which can, in turn, negatively affect the model as a whole. 

Is AI cannibalization a problem?
AI is eating itself. When generative AI is "trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality," said The New York Times. This is known as model collapse.

Still, AI companies have their hands tied. "To develop ever more advanced AI products, Big Tech might have no choice but to feed its programs AI-generated content, or it just might not be able to sift human fodder from the synthetic," said The Atlantic. As it stands, synthetic data is necessary to keep up with the growing technology. 

That's not to say that all AI-generated data is bad. There are "certain contexts where synthetic data can help AIs learn," said the Times. "For example, when output from a larger AI model is used to train a smaller one or when the correct answer can be verified, like the solution to a math problem or the best strategies in games like chess or Go." Also, experts are working to create synthetic data sets that are less likely to collapse a model. 

Is AI taking over the internet?
The monumental amount of AI content on the internet, including tweets by bots, absurd pictures and fake reviews, has given rise to a more sinister belief. The "dead internet" theory is the belief that the "vast majority of internet traffic, posts and users have been replaced by bots and AI-generated content and that people no longer shape the direction of the internet," said Forbes. 

Luckily, experts say that the dead internet theory has not come to fruition yet. "The vast majority of posts that go viral — unhinged opinions, witticisms, astute observations, reframing of the familiar in a new context — are not AI-generated," said Forbes.