If you’ve spent any time around kids lately, you’ve probably heard about “brain rot.” Named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, it’s defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

As it turns out, it’s not just human minds getting rotted by low-effort memes like “6-7” and “skibidi toilet“: in new research, a team from Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University found that “continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs).”

The resulting study is yet to be peer reviewed, but its findings suggest that AI’s sense of reasoning and con

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