AI becomes dumber when trained on viral internet content

Whether it's hours spent scrolling through TikTok or a good doomscroll across long, rambling X threads, we’re all guilty of engaging in one of life’s more recent trends: "brainrot".

That rather intense phrase relates to a trend of declining cognitive concentration driven by short-form, attention-grabbing content. In other words, content is designed for a reduced attention span.

But while humans are guilty of this, it turns out that we’re not the only ones. A team of scientists has found that AI models, when trained on this type of content, show exactly the same response.

The team, made up of researchers from Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University, fed a collection of large language models months of viral, high-engagement content from X.

In doing