Live data from Hacker News

LLMs can get "brain rot"

llm-brain-rot.github.io

71–80 of 310 posts

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#71
post #65

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? ;) Al…

> 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.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#72

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.

I'm reminded of this 'repair' video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e6motL4QMc

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#74
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am mostly concerned with the irreversibility part. More developed brains probably would not be affected as much.

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&vq=…

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_development

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofya_Kovalevskaya

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#75
" 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?

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#76
post #75

" 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?

... 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

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#79

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN