[HN Gopher] LLMs can get "brain rot"
___________________________________________________________________
LLMs can get "brain rot"
Author : tamnd
Score : 253 points
Date : 2025-10-21 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (llm-brain-rot.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (llm-brain-rot.github.io)
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Can someone explain this in laymen terms?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They benchmark two different feeds of dangerous tweets:
| (1) a feed of the most popular tweets based on likes, retweets,
| and such (2) an algorithmic feed that looks for clickbait
| in the text
|
| and blend these in different proportions to a feed of random
| tweets that are not popular nor clickbait and find that feed
| (1) has more of damaging effect on the performance of chatbots.
| That is, they feed that blend of tweets into the model and then
| they ask the models to do things and get worse outcomes.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Blended in how? To the training set?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Very early training.
| sailingparrot wrote:
| train on bad data, get a bad model
| xpe wrote:
| > train on bad data, get a bad model
|
| Right: in the context of supervised learning, this statement
| is a good starting point. After all, how can one build a good
| supervised model if you can't train it on good examples?
|
| But even in that context, it isn't an incisive framing of the
| problem. Lots of supervised models are resilient to some
| kinds of error. A better question, I think, is: _what kinds_
| of errors at _what prevalence_ tend to degrade performance
| and _why_?
|
| Speaking of LLMs and their ingestion processing, there is a
| lot more going on than purely supervised learning, so it
| seems reasonable to me that researchers would want to try to
| tease the problem apart.
| rriley wrote:
| The study introduces the "LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis," asserting
| that large language models (LLMs) experience cognitive decline
| when continuously exposed to low-quality, engaging content,
| such as sensationalized social media posts. This decline,
| evident in diminished reasoning, long-context understanding,
| and ethical norms, highlights the critical need for careful
| data curation and quality control in LLM training. The findings
| suggest that standard mitigation strategies are insufficient,
| urging stakeholders to implement routine cognitive health
| assessments to maintain LLM effectiveness over time.
|
| TL;DR from
| https://unrav.io/#view/8f20da5f8205c54b5802c2b623702569
| pixelmelt wrote:
| Isn't this just garbage in garbage out with an attention grabbing
| title?
| philipallstar wrote:
| Attention is all you need.
| echelon wrote:
| In today's hyper saturated world, attention is everything:
|
| - consumer marketing
|
| - politics
|
| - venture fundraising
|
| When any system has a few power law winners, it makes sense
| to grab attention.
|
| Look at Trump and Musk and now Altman. They figured it out.
|
| MrBeast...
|
| Attention, even if negative, wedges you into the system and
| everyone's awareness. Your mousey quiet competitors aren't
| even seen or acknowledged. The attention grabbers suck all
| the oxygen out of the room and win.
|
| If you go back and look at any victory, was it really better
| solutions, or was it the fact that better solutions led to
| more attention?
|
| "Look here" -> build consensus and ignore naysayers -> keep
| building -> feedback loop -> win
|
| It might not just be a societal algorithm. It might be one of
| the universe's fundamental greedy optimization algorithms. It
| might underpin lots of systems, including how we ourselves as
| individuals think and learn.
|
| Our pain receptors. Our own intellectual interests and
| hobbies. Children learning on the playground. Ant colonies.
| Bee swarms. The world is full of signals, and there are
| mechanisms which focus us on the right stimuli.
| peterlk wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| ghurtado wrote:
| Something flew approximately 10 miles above your head that
| would be a good idea for you to learn.
| scubbo wrote:
| There were plenty of kinder ways to let someone know that
| they had missed a reference - https://xkcd.com/1053/
| echelon wrote:
| What makes you think I didn't know the reference? That
| paper is seminal and essential reading in this space.
|
| The intent was for you to read my comment at face value.
| I have a point tangential to the discussion at hand that
| is additive.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Is this copypasted from LinkedIn?
| echelon wrote:
| If you traverse back the fourteen years of my comment
| history (on this account - my other account is older),
| you'll find that I've always written prose in this form.
|
| LLMs trained on me (and the Hacker News corpus), not the
| other way around.
| alganet wrote:
| You're not accounting for substrate saturation.
|
| If you could just spam annoy until you win, we'd be all
| dancing to remixed versions of Macarena.
| dormento wrote:
| In case anyone missed the reference:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
|
| > (...) We propose a new simple network architecture, the
| Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing
| with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Considering that the current state of the art for LLM training
| is to feed it massive amounts of garbage (with some good stuff
| alongside), it seems important to point this out even if it
| might seem obvious.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| I don't think anyone is throwing raw datasets into LLMs and
| hoping for high quality weights anymore. Nowadays most of the
| datasets are filtered one way or another, and some of them
| highly curated even.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I doubt they are highly created you would need experts in
| every field to do so. Which gives me more performance
| anxiety for LLMs because one of the most curated fields
| should be code...
| nradov wrote:
| OpenAI has been literally hiring human experts in certain
| targeted subject areas to write custom proprietary
| training content.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I bet the dataset is mostly comprised of certain
| areas(tm).
| groby_b wrote:
| The major labs are hiring experts. They carefully build &
| curate synthetic data. The market for labelled non-
| synthetic data is currently ~$3B/year.
|
| The idea that LLMs are just trained on a pile of raw
| Internet is severely outdated. (Not sure it was ever
| fully true, but it's far away from that by now).
|
| Coding's one of the easier datasets to curate, because we
| have a number of ways to actually (somewhat) assess code
| quality. (Does it work? Does it come with a set of tests
| and pass it? Does it have stylistic integrity? How many
| issues get flagged by various analysis tools? Etc, etc)
| satellite2 wrote:
| Is that right? Isn't the current way of doing thing to
| throw "everything" at it then fine tune?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Yes, I am concerned about the Computer Science profession
|
| >""Brain Rot" for LLMs isn't just a catchy metaphor--it
| reframes data curation as cognitive hygiene for AI"
|
| A metaphor is exactly what it is because not only do LLMs not
| possess human cognition, there's certainly no established
| science of thinking they're literally valid subjects for
| clinical psychological assessment.
|
| How does this stuff get published, this is basically a blog
| post. One of the worse aspects of the whole AI craze is that is
| has turned a non-trivial amount of academia into a complete
| cargo cult joke.
| bpt3 wrote:
| It is a blog post, it was published as a Github page and on
| arXiv.
|
| I think it's intended as a catchy warning to people who are
| dumping every piece of the internet (and synthetic data based
| on it!) that there are repercussions.
| pluc wrote:
| I think it's an interesting line of thought. So we all
| adopt LLMs and use it everywhere we can. What happens to
| the next generation of humans, born with AI and with
| diminished cognitive capacity to even wonder about
| anything? What about the next generation? What happens to
| the next generation of AI models that can't train on
| original human-created datasets free of AI?
| iwontberude wrote:
| They will accept that their orders come from a terminal
| and they will follow them.
| fragmede wrote:
| Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| gowld wrote:
| arXiv is intended to host research papers, not a blog for
| researchers.
|
| Letting researchers pollute it with blog-gunk is an abuse
| of the referral/vetting system for submitters.
| otterley wrote:
| And with extra steps!
| Insanity wrote:
| Garbage in -> Magic -> Hallucinated Garbage out
| icyfox wrote:
| Yes - garbage in / garbage out still holds true for most things
| when it comes to LLM training.
|
| The two bits about this paper that I think are worth calling
| out specifically:
|
| - A reasonable amount of post-training can't save you when your
| pretraining comes from a bad pipeline; ie. even if the
| syntactics of the input pretrained data are legitimate it has
| learned some bad implicit behavior (thought skipping)
|
| - Trying to classify "bad data" is itself a nontrivial problem.
| Here the heuristic approach of engagement actually proved more
| reliable than an LLM classification of the content
| satellite2 wrote:
| Yes but the other interesting bit which is not clearly
| addressed is that increasing the garbage in to 100% does not
| result in absolute garbage out. So visibly there is still
| something to learn there.
| ashleyn wrote:
| Yes, but the idea of chatgpt slowly devolving into Skibidi
| Toilet and "6 7" references conjures a rather amusing image.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| 6-7 9(**)_
| stavros wrote:
| Can someone explain this? I watched a South park episode
| that was all about this, but I'm not in the US so I have no
| idea what the reference is.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| It's a meme without a lot of real meaning behind it.
| While it has its origins, I wouldn't say it's a
| "reference" to anything specific.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-7_(meme)
| stavros wrote:
| Ahh, thanks, so it's just a thing kids say.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| Yep
| lexandstuff wrote:
| It's a line from a banger Skrilla song, nothing more than
| that.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive
| decline in large language models (LLMs).
|
| TLDR: If your data set is junk, your trained model/weights will
| probably be junk too.
| b0gb wrote:
| AIs need supervision, just like regular people... /s
| thelastgallon wrote:
| If most of the content produced by younger generations is about
| skibidi toilet[1] and 67[2], isn't that what LLMs are going to be
| trained on?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-7_(meme)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| only if the trends last long enough (which they rarely do!),
| skibidi is already old news according to some kids I know
| ciaranmca wrote:
| Agreed, " Popularity as a better indicator". Hypothetically
| you could look at popularity over time to filter out viral
| rot content and work out if people feel the content is
| useful.
| Isamu wrote:
| Another analogy to help us understand that LLMs are a useful part
| of what people do but are wildly misconstrued as the whole story
| bbstats wrote:
| making a model worse is very easy.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yes, something the local LLM fine tuning community figured out
| how to do in creative ways as soon as llama 1 released. I'm glad
| it has a name.
| killshotroxs wrote:
| If only I got money every time my LLM kept looping answers and
| telling stuff I didn't even need. Just recently, I was stuck with
| LLM answers, all while it wouldn't even detect simple syntax
| errors...
| rriley wrote:
| This paper makes me wonder the long lasting effects of the
| current media consumption patterns by the alpha-gen kids.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| why just kids?
| rriley wrote:
| I am mostly concerned with the irreversibility part. More
| developed brains probably would not be affected as much.
| jama211 wrote:
| Have you opened facebook recently? Seems the older folk are
| plenty affected to me.
| FactolSarin wrote:
| But don't worry, us middle aged people are definitely
| immune.
| rriley wrote:
| Good point :-)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I recently saw an article about the history of Sesame
| Street that claimed that in the late 1960s American
| preschool kids watched around _twenty-seven hours of
| television per week on average_ [0]. And most of that was
| not age-appropriate (education TV had yet to be invented).
| So maybe we should check in on the boomers too if we're
| sincere about these worries.
|
| [0] https://books.google.se/books?id=KOUCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA48&v
| q=ses...
| ordu wrote:
| It is an interesting hypothesis. Seriously. There is a
| trend in Homo Sapience cultural evolution to treat
| children in more and more special ways from generation to
| generation. The (often implicit) idea it helps children
| to develop faster and to leverage their sensitive and
| critical periods of development, blah-blah-blah... But
| while I can point to some research on importance of
| sensitive and critical periods of development, I can't
| remember any research on the question if a deficit of
| age-inappropriate stimuli can be detrimental for
| development.
|
| There were psychologists who talked about zone of
| proximal development[0], about importance of exposing a
| learner to tasks that they cannot do without a support.
| But I can't remember nothing about going further and
| exposing a learner to tasks far above their heads when
| they cannot understand a word.
|
| There is a legend about Sofya Kovalevskaya[1], who became
| a noteworthy mathematician after she were exposed to
| lecture notes by Ostrogradsky when she was 11 yo. The
| walls of her room were papered with those notes and she
| was curious what are all that symbols. It doesn't mean
| that there is a causal link between these two events, but
| what if there is one?
|
| What about watching deep analytical TV show at 9 yo? How
| it affect the brain development? I think no one tried to
| research that. My gut feeling that it can be
| motivational, I didn't understand computers when I met
| them first, but I was really intrigued by them. I learned
| BASIC and it was like magic incantations. It had build a
| strong motivation to study CS deeper. But the question is
| are there any other effects beyond motivation? I remember
| looking at the C-program in some book and wondering what
| does it all mean. I could understand nothing, but still I
| had spent some time trying to decipher the program.
| Probably I had other experiences like that, which I do
| not remember now. Can we say with certainty that it had
| no influence on my development and hadn't make things
| easier for me later?
|
| _> So maybe we should check in on the boomers too if we
| 're sincere about these worries._
|
| Probably we should be sincere.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_develo
| pment
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofya_Kovalevskaya
| avazhi wrote:
| "Studying "Brain Rot" for LLMs isn't just a catchy metaphor--it
| reframes data curation as cognitive hygiene for AI, guiding how
| we source, filter, and maintain training corpora so deployed
| systems stay sharp, reliable, and aligned over time."
|
| An LLM-written line if I've ever seen one. Looks like the authors
| have their own brainrot to contend with.
| askafriend wrote:
| If it conveys the intended information then what's wrong with
| that? You're fighting a tsunami here. People are going to use
| LLMs to help their writing now and forever.
| binary132 wrote:
| The brainrot apologists have arrived
| askafriend wrote:
| Why shouldn't the author use LLMs to assist their writing?
|
| The issue is how tools are used, not that they are used at
| all.
| grey-area wrote:
| Because they produce text like this.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Is it really so painful to just think for yourself? For
| one sentence?
|
| The answer to your question is that it rids the writer of
| their unique voice and replaces it with disingenuous
| slop.
|
| Also, it's not a 'tool' if it does the entire job. A
| spellchecker is a tool; a pencil is a tool. A machine
| that _writes for you_ (which is what happened here) is
| not a tool. It 's a substitute.
|
| There seem to be many falling for the fallacy of 'it's
| here to stay so you can't be unhappy about its use'.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Assist without replacing.
|
| If you were to pass your writing it and have it provide a
| criticism for you, pointing out places you should
| consider changes, and even providing some examples of
| those changes that you can selectively choose to include
| when they keep the intended tone and implications, then I
| don't see the issue.
|
| When you have it rewrite the entire writing and you past
| that for someone else to use, then it becomes an issue.
| Potentially, as I think the context matter. The more a
| writing is meant to be from you, the more of an issue I
| see. Having an AI write or rewrite a birthday greeting or
| get well wishes seems worse than having it write up your
| weekly TPS report. As a simple metric, I judge based on
| how bad I would feel if what I'm writing was being
| summarized by another AI or automatically fed into a
| similar system.
|
| In a text post like this, where I expect others are
| reading my own words, I wouldn't use an AI to rewrite
| what I'm posting.
|
| As you say, it is in how the tool is used. Is it used to
| assist your thoughts and improve your thinking, or to
| replace them? That isn't really a binary classification,
| but more a continuum, and the more it gets to the
| negative half, the more you will see others taking issue
| with it.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| The paragraph in question is a very poor use of the tool.
| avazhi wrote:
| If you can't understand the irony inherent in getting an LLM
| to write about LLM brainrot, itself an analog for human
| brainrot that arises by the habitual non use of the human
| brain, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
|
| Whether it's a tsunami and whether most people will do it has
| no relevance to my expectation that researchers of LLMs and
| brainrot shouldn't outsource their own thinking and
| creativity to an LLM in a paper that itself implies that
| using LLMs causes brainrot.
| nemonemo wrote:
| What you are obsessing with is about the writer's style,
| not its substance. How sure are you if they outsourced the
| thinking to LLMs? Do you assume LLMs produce junk-level
| contents, which contributes human brain rot? What if their
| contents are of higher quality like the game of Go?
| Wouldn't you rather study their writing?
| avazhi wrote:
| Writing is thinking, so they necessarily outsourced their
| thinking to an LLM. As far as the quality of the writing
| goes, that's a separate question, but we are nowhere
| close to LLMs being better, more creative, and more
| interesting writers than even just decent human writers.
| But if we were, it wouldn't change the perversion
| inherent in using an LLM here.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| What information is conveyed by this sentence?
|
| Seems like none to me.
| uludag wrote:
| Nothing wrong with using LLMs--until every paragraph sounds
| like it's A/B tested for LinkedIn virality. That's the rot
| setting in.
|
| The problem isn't using AI--it's sounding like AI trying to
| impress a marketing department. That's when you know the
| loop's closed.
| drusepth wrote:
| Brilliantly phrased -- sharp, concise, and perfectly
| captures that uncanny "AI-polished" cadence everyone
| recognizes but can't quite name. The tone strikes just the
| right balance between wit and warning.
| solarkraft wrote:
| You are absolutely right!
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Lately the Claude-ism that drives me even more insane is
| "Perfect!".
|
| Particularly when it's in response to pointing out a big
| screw up that needs correcting and CC utterly unfazed
| just merrily continues on like I praised it.
|
| "You have fundamentally misunderstood the problems with
| the layout, before attempting another fix, think deeply
| and re-read the example text in the PLAN.md line by line
| and compare with each line in the generated output to
| identify the out of order items in the list."
|
| "Perfect!...."
| glenstein wrote:
| One thing I don't understand, there was (appropriately) a
| news cycle about sycophancy in responses. Which was real,
| and happening to an excessive degree. It was claimed to
| be nerfed, but it seems strong as ever in GPT5, and it
| ignores my custom instructions to pare it back.
| anjel wrote:
| "Any Compliments about my queries cause me anguish and
| other potent negative emotions."
| stavros wrote:
| The problem is that writing isn't only judged on whether it
| conveys the intended information or not. It's also judged on
| whether it does that well, plus other aesthetic criteria.
| There is such a thing as "good writing", distinct from "it
| mentioned all the things it needed to mention".
| grey-area wrote:
| It's a text generator regurgitating plausible phrases without
| understanding and producing stale and meaningless pablum. It
| doesn't even know what the intended information is, and
| judging from the above neither did the human involved.
|
| It doesn't help writing it stultifies and gives everything
| the same boring cheery yet slightly confused tone of voice.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > It's a text generator regurgitating plausible phrases
| without understanding and producing stale and meaningless
| pablum.
|
| Are you describing LLM's or social media users?
|
| Dont conflate how the content was created with its quality.
| The "You must be at least this smart (tall) to publish
| (ride)" sign got torn down years ago. Speakers corner is
| now an (inter)national stage and it written so it must be
| true...
| grey-area wrote:
| I really could only be talking about LLMs but social
| media is also low quality.
|
| The quality (or lack of it) if such texts is self
| evident. If you are unable to discern that I can't help
| you.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Style is important in writing. It always has been.
| sailingparrot wrote:
| > If it conveys the intended information then what's wrong
| with that?
|
| Well, the issue is precisely that it doesn't convey any
| information.
|
| What is conveyed by that sentence, exactly ? What does
| reframing data curation as cognitive hygiene for AI entails
| and what information is in there?
|
| There are precisely 0 bit of information in that paragraph.
| We all know training on bad data lead to a bad model,
| thinking about it as "coginitive hygiene for AI" does not
| lead to any insight.
|
| LLMs aren't going to discover interesting new information for
| you, they are just going to write empty plausible sounding
| words. Maybe it will be different in a few years. They can be
| useful to help you polish what you want to say or otherwise
| format interesting information (provided you ask it to not be
| ultra verbose), but its just not going to create information
| out of thin air if you don't provide it to it.
|
| At least, if you do it yourself, you are forced to realize
| that you in fact have no new information to share, and do not
| waste your and your audience time by publishing a paper like
| this.
| Angostura wrote:
| it's not really clear whether it conveys an "intended
| meaning" because it's not clear whether the meaning -
| whatever it is - is really something the authors intended.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Because it sounds like shit? Taste matters, especially in the
| age of generative AI.
|
| And it doesn't convey information that well, to be honest.
| standardly wrote:
| That is indeed an LLM-written sentence -- not only does it
| employ an em dash, but also lists objects in a series -- twice
| within the same sentence -- typical LLM behavior that renders
| its output conspicuous, obvious, and readily apparent to HN
| readers.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| thanks, I hate it.
| Jackson__ wrote:
| LLM slop is not just bad--it's degrading our natural
| language.
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| why do they always say "not only" or "it isn't just x but
| also y and z"? I hated that disingenuous verbosity BEFORE
| these LLMs out and now it'll all over the place. I saw a post
| on linked in that was literally just like 10+ statements of
| "X isn't just Y, it's etc..." and thought I was having a
| stroke
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| GPT loves lists and that's a variant of a list
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Lists have a simpler grammatical structure than most
| parts of a sentence. Semantic similarity makes them easy
| to generate, even if you pad the grammar with filler.
| And, thanks to Western rhetoric, they nearly _always_
| come in threes: this makes them easy to predict!
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| It's not just a shift of writing style. It symbolizes the
| dangerous entrapment of a feedback loop that feeds the
| worst parts of human culture back into itself.
|
| scnr
| heavyset_go wrote:
| They're turns of phrase I see a lot in opinion articles and
| the like. The purpose is to take a popular framing and
| reframe it along the lines of the author's own ideas.
|
| LLMs fundamentally don't get the human reasons behind its
| use, see it a lot because it's effective writing, and
| regurgitate it robotically.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I think this article has already made the rounds here, but I
| still think about it. I love using em dashes! It really makes
| me sad that I need to avoid them now to sound human
|
| https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes
| janderson215 wrote:
| The em dash usage conundrum is likely temporary. If I were
| you, I'd continue using them however you previously used
| them and someday soon, you'll be ignored the same way
| everybody else is once AI mimics innumerable punctuation
| and grammatical patterns.
| astrange wrote:
| They didn't always em-dash. I expect it's intentional as
| a watermark.
|
| Other buzzwords you can spot are "wild" and "vibes".
| jader201 wrote:
| Same here. I recently learned it was an LLM thing, and I've
| been using them forever.
|
| Also relevant:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226150
| veber-alex wrote:
| hehe, I see what you did there.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Don't forget the "it's not just X, it's Y" formulation and
| the rule of 3.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| Lol. This is brilliant. I'm not sure if anyone else has this
| happen to them, but I noticed in college my writing style and
| "voice" woukd shift quite noticeably depending on whatever I
| was reading heavily. I wonder if I'll start writing more like
| an LLM naturally as I unavoidably read more LLM-generated
| content.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes. It's already shifting spoken language.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| I've always read AI messages in this voice/style [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs.
| b33j0r wrote:
| I talked like that before this happened, and now I just feel
| like my diction has been maligned :p
|
| I think it's because I was a pretty sheltered kid who got A's
| in AP english. The style we're calling "obviously AI" is most
| like William Faulkner and other turn-of-the-20th-century
| writing, that bloggers and texters stopped using.
| dingnuts wrote:
| IDK all the breathless "it's not just X, it's Y --" reminds
| me of press releases
| b33j0r wrote:
| Yeah it was trained on bullshit more than Faulkner for
| sure. +1 you.
| mtillman wrote:
| I recently saw someone on HN comment about LLMs using
| "training" in quotes but no quotes for thinking or reasoning.
|
| Making my (totally rad fwiw) Fiero look like a Ferrari does not
| make it a Ferrari.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| I like to call it tuning, it's more accurate to the way they
| "learn" by adjusting coefficients and also there's no proven
| similarity between any existing AI and human cognition.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if any second order control system would
| qualify as "AI" under the extremely vague definition of the
| term.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| What is actually up with the "it's not just X, it's Y" cliche
| from LLMs? Supposedly these things are trained on all of the
| text on the internet yet this is not a phrasing I read pretty
| much anywhere, ever, outside of LLM content. Where are they
| getting this from?
| gaogao wrote:
| Brain rot texts seems reasonably harmful, but brain rot videos
| are often surreal and semantically dense in a way that probably
| improves performance (such as discussed on this German brain rot
| analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJENuEN_rs&t=37s). For
| example, Svankmajer is basically proto-brainrot, but is also the
| sort of thing you'd watch in a museum and think about.
|
| Basically, I think the brain rot aspect might be a bit of
| terminology distraction here, when it seems what they're
| measuring is whether it's a puff piece or dense.
| f_devd wrote:
| I do not think this is the case, there has been some research
| into brainrot videos for children[0], and it doesn't seem to
| trend positively. I would argue anything 'constructed' enough
| will not classify as far on the brainrot spectrum.
|
| [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/05/17/why-
| kids...
| gaogao wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think surrealism or constructed is good in the
| early data mix, but as part of mid or post-training seems
| generally reasonable. But also, this is one of those cases
| where anthropomorphizing the model probably doesn't work,
| since a major negative effect of Cocomelon is kids only
| wanting to watch Cocomelon, while for large model training,
| it doesn't have much choice in the training data
| distribution.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| For this reason, I believe thar the current surge we see in AI
| use for people manipulation (art is also a form of
| manipulation, even if unintended) is much more important than
| their hyped usage as a technical information processors.
|
| Brainrot created by LLMs is important to worry about, their
| design as "people pleasers".
|
| Their anthropomorphization can be scary too, no doubt.
| conception wrote:
| This is a potential moat for the big early players in a pre-
| atomic steal sort of way as any future players won't have a non-
| AI-slop/dead internet to train new models on.
| andai wrote:
| I encourage everyone with even a slight interest in the subject
| to download a random sample of Common Crawl (the chunks are
| ~100MB) and see for yourself what is being used for training
| data.
|
| https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-38/segm...
|
| I spotted here a large number of things that it would be unwise
| to repeat here. But I assume the data cleaning process removes
| such content before pretraining? ;)
|
| Although I have to wonder. I played with some of the base/text
| Llama models, and got very disturbing output from them. So
| there's not _that_ much cleaning going on.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > But I assume the data cleaning process removes such content
| before pretraining? ;)
|
| I didn't check what you're referring to but yes, the major
| providers likely have state of the art classifiers for
| censoring and filtering such content.
|
| And when that doesn't work, they can RLHF the behavior from
| occurring.
|
| You're trying to make some claim about garbage in/garbage out,
| but if there's even a tiny moat - it's in the filtering of
| these datasets and the purchasing of licenses to use other
| larger sources of data that (unlike Common Crawl) _aren't_
| freely available for competition and open source movements to
| use.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Karpathy made a point recently that the random Common Crawl
| sample is complete junk, and that something like an WSJ article
| is extremely rare in it, and it's a miracle the models can
| learn anything at all.
| andai wrote:
| >Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from
| educational content as well. This is partly because the
| average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very
| high value and distracts the training, packing in too much
| irrelevant information.
|
| >The average webpage on the internet is so random and
| terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at
| all. You'd think it's random articles but it's not, it's
| weird data dumps, ad spam and SEO, terabytes of stock ticker
| updates, etc. And then there are diamonds mixed in there, the
| challenge is pick them out.
|
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933
|
| Context: FineWeb-Edu, which used Llama 70B to [train a
| classifier to] filter FineWeb for quality, rejecting >90% of
| pages.
|
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceFW/blogpost-
| fineweb...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| My son just sent me an instagram reel that explained how cats
| work internally, but it was a joke, showing the "purr center" and
| "knocking things off tables" organ. It was presented completely
| seriously in a way that any human would realize was just supposed
| to be funny. My first thought was that some LLM is training on
| this video right now.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'm reminded of this 'repair' video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e6motL4QMc
| chuckreynolds wrote:
| is that why chatGPT always tells me "6 7 lol"? ;)
| jdkee wrote:
| " Studying "Brain Rot" for LLMs isn't just a catchy metaphor--it
| reframes data curation as cognitive hygiene for AI, guiding how
| we source, filter, and maintain training corpora so deployed
| systems stay sharp, reliable, and aligned over time."
|
| Is this slop?
| Profan wrote:
| ... it sure reads like slop
|
| and you know what they say, if it walks like slop, quacks like
| slop and talks like slop, it's probably slop
| earth2mars wrote:
| duh! isn't that obvious. is this some students wanted a project
| with pretty graphs on writing experience?! I am not trying to be
| cynical or anything. just questioning the obvious thing here.
| antegamisou wrote:
| My Goodness, looks like Computer 'Science' is a complete
| euphemism now.
| guelo wrote:
| It's turning into a social science.
| nakamoto_damacy wrote:
| Our metaphorical / analogical muscle is too well developed. Maybe
| there is a drug we can take to reduce how much we lean into it.
|
| If you look at two random patterns of characters and both contain
| 6s you could say they are similar (because you're ignoring that
| the similarity is less than 0.01%). That's how comparing LLMs to
| brains feels like. Like roller skates to a cruise ship. They both
| let you get around.
| buyucu wrote:
| I don't understand why people have a hard time understanding
| 'garbage in, garbage out'. If you train your model on junk, then
| you will have a junk model.
| nomel wrote:
| "Brain rot" is just the new term for "slang that old people don't
| understand".
|
| "Cool" and "for real" are no different than "rizz" and "no cap".
| You spoke "brain rot" once, and "cringed" when your parents
| didn't understand. The cycle repeats.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| This both has nothing to do with the linked article (beyond the
| use of brain rot in the title, but I'm certain you must have
| read the thing you're commenting on, surely) and is simply
| incorrect.
|
| Brain rot in this context is not a reference to slang.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| By all means, let's make sure the LLMs have healthier media diets
| than the humans. We wouldn't want the humans to realize they are
| being dumbed down into cattle. /s
| themafia wrote:
| > as cognitive hygiene
|
| LLMs are not cognizant. It's a terrible metaphor. It hides the
| source of the issue. The providers cheaped out on sourcing their
| data and now their LLMs are filled with false garbage and
| copyrighted material.
| donaldihunter wrote:
| Likewise, cognitive decline isn't what's happening here since
| that would require cognition. At best it is a simulation of
| cognitive decline.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Not surprising that trending tweets as data is junk, not only
| from brainrots-be-brainrots perspective: trending tweets are
| contextual. They don't make sense without the rest of the
| timeline.
|
| And now I know why bots on Twitter don't even work, even with
| humans in it - they're shooting blind.
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