Gizmodo: Clickbait Gives AI Models ‘Brain Rot,’ Researchers Find – “If you think scrolling the internet all day is making you dumber, just imagine what it’s doing to large language models that consume a near-endless stream of absolute trash crawled from the web in the name of “training.” A research team recently proposed and tested a theory called “LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis,” which posited that the more junk data is fed into an AI model, the worse its outputs would become. Turns out that is a pretty solid theory, as a preprint paper published to arXiv by the team shows “brain rot” impacts LLMs and results in non-trivial cognitive declines. To see how LLMs perform on a steady diet of internet sewage, researchers from Texas A&M University, University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University identified two types of “junk” data: short social media posts that have lots of engagement, including likes and reposts, and longer content with clickbait headlines, sensationalized presentation, and a superficial level of actual information. Basically, the same type of content that is also rotting out our own brains. With that in mind, the researchers scraped together a sample of one million posts on X and then trained four different LLMs on varying mixtures of control data and junk data to see how it would affect performance…” [h/t Pete Weiss]