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A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

nytimes.com

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Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#151

Post by daveguy »

wslh wrote: post #42
randycupertino wrote: post #7

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page. There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the…

Just a few hours ago, I was trying to find the profile of an excellent swimmer I met at dinner yesterday. I knew his first name and the club he swims in, so I searched his name together with the club and "swimming" on Instagram without using the keyword club. Almost all the results were attractive girls posing in swimsuits, but none were actual amateur swimmers. The guy I was looking for didn't appear at all. BTW, mi…

> ...I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.

This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#152

Post by daveguy »

jimbokun wrote: post #109
ryandrake wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who is going to crack first? Will job applicants somehow remove their borg implants and learn to think on their own? Or will businesses give in and admit that nobody can think for themselves anymore, allowing applicants to use ChatGPT during their interviews (knowing that they're probably going to need to use it on the job, too).

Or businesses just use ChatGPT to replace the entry level employee.

I can't wait for the first company to do this. I hope someone comes around to do a good post mortem from the rubble.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#154

Post by daveguy »

Barrin92 wrote: post #85
Mabusto wrote: post #30

I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool. Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your bra…

>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input. And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any to…

I believe you are thinking of the Vertiwalk lift:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYqHWDt5wRk

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#155

Post by Karrot_Kream »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #145
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittificati…

> derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments. Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part…

> You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN.

I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.

My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#156

Post by Karrot_Kream »

cloverich wrote: post #137
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!! Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that…

> We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are com…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848504

206 points and 129 points on a 47 word blog post where most of the thread is about what people think about the title.

Are you sure it's actually different from other social media sites or do you just find it more relevant to you than the others?

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#157

Post by sureglymop »

triMichael wrote: post #135
sureglymop wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand how they used "brainrot". I thought brain rot was this generations surrealism, a type of art? By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because .

There are two types of "brainrot" that are related but not the same. Essentially brainrot is anything that is anti-thinking. The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you. On t…

> So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way.

Using language in an anti-thinking way seems like a somewhat interestingly thought through mission though. If that's even the case.

The fact that you try to think about it that much though is arguably what makes it almost funny.

Art doesn't have to make you think or convey any ideas. L'art pour l'art. It doesn't matter if it's on TikTok or wherever.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#158

Post by damnesian »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #15
randycupertino wrote: post #7

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page. There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the…

On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them. I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discu…

I never use the app, only login to old. and when old is taken away, I will take my marbles and go home.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#159

Post by skinnymuch »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #141
nekusar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else. The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/ There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And…

The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.

A better way to think of it is that the western “left” isn’t part of the global left. Using tankie unironically is a classic example.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#160

Post by bloppe »

eboynyc32 wrote: post #142
bloppe wrote: post #136

The wishful cynic in me sometimes thinks this might actually lead to a partial reversal of ageism in the workforce. It's almost starting to look like the kids graduating from school with chatgpt are actually handicapped (painting in extremely broad strokes; there will always be prodigies) and those who graduated or worked before 2022 will actually become more desirable to hire. I'm sure this take is at best oversimpl…

Such bs! Every new tech causes the disgrace of society! Music, films, dancing, comic books, the internet. Everything is always evil except the bible of course.

A recent Stanford grad just told me "it's all just bots talking to bots", referring to students who use ChatGPT to do all their homework, and teachers who use ChatGPT to grade the work that was submitted by ChatGPT. And because of the pandemic, somehow people think it's now reasonable to do standardized testing in private with internet access. It's an anecdote, but she was really dissatisfied with her experience there. And that's one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

Do you have a different experience in academia recently?

Adopting LLMs is easy. I use Claude code for tons of stuff, but I'm very grateful it wasn't around when I was in school and starting out in the industry.

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