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LLMs can get "brain rot"

llm-brain-rot.github.io

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Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#231

Post by roenxi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #160
landdate wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suddenly I see all these people come out of the woodworks talking about "em dashes". Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing. No wonder LLM's use them.

> Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing Totally agree. What the fuck did Nabokov, Joyce and Dickinson know about language. /s

Great writers aren't experts in the look of punctuation, I don't think anyone makes a point of you have to read Dickinson in the original font that she wrote in. Some of the greats hand-wrote their work in script that may as well be hieroglyphics, the manuscripts get preserved but not because people think the look is superior to any old typesetting which is objectively more readable.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#232

Post by Animats »

The two big problems listed:

* Thought-skipping as the primary lesion: models increasingly truncate or skip reasoning chains, explaining most of the error growth.

* Popularity as a better indicator: the popularity, a non-semantic metric, of a tweet is a better indicator of the Brain Rot effect than the length in M1.

That's what you'd expect. Popular culture content tends to jump from premise to conclusion without showing the work. Train on popular culture and you get that. Really, what's supposed to come from training on the Twitter firehose? (Can you still buy that feed? Probably not.) This is a surprise-free result.

At least have a curated model (no social media) and a junk model to compare.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#233

Post by fwgijcqywqeo »

kangs wrote: post #202
jader201 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I recently learned it was an LLM thing, and I've been using them forever. Also relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226150

its not an llm thing -- its just -- folks don't know how to use them (pun intended). Same for ; "" vs '', ex, eg, fe, etc. and so many more. I like em all, but I'm crazy.

crazy vibes man

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#234

Post by immibis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #217
lxgr wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is clear: Unicode needs cryptographically signed dashes and whitespace characters.

Tied to what? Show us a way to create a provably, cryptographically integrity-preserving chain from a person's thoughts to those thoughts expressed in a digital medium, and you may just get both the Nobel prize and a trial for crimes against humanity, for the same thing.

It was a joke.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#236

Post by mildzebrataste »

furyofantares wrote: post #218
turtletontine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this article has already made the rounds here, but I still think about it. I love using em dashes! It really makes me sad that I need to avoid them now to sound human https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes

I don't think you do. All this LLM written crap is easily spottable without it. Nearly every paragraph has a heading, numerous sentences that start with one or two words of fluff then a colon then the actual statement. Excessive bullet point lists. Always telling you "here's the key insight". But really the only damning thing is, you get a few paragraphs in and realize there's no motivation. It's just a slick infodum…

Two more tells: 1. phrasing the negative and then switching (x is not just this, but this and more or y does this not because of this, but because of this, that, and one other thing that certainly would necessitate an Oxford comma.)

2. Gerunds all day every day. Constantly putting things in a passive voice so that all the verbs end in -ing.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#237

Post by vardump »

standardly wrote: post #93
avazhi wrote: post #47

“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.” An LLM-written line if I’ve ever seen one. Looks like the authors have their own brainrot to contend with.

That is indeed an LLM-written sentence — not only does it employ an em dash, but also lists objects in a series — twice within the same sentence — typical LLM behavior that renders its output conspicuous, obvious, and readily apparent to HN readers.

Damn, I've used em dash often — do I have to stop using it?

Sigh.

Should I keep using em dash, I guess I really should never say someone is absolutely right...

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#238

Post by latexr »

furyofantares wrote: post #218
turtletontine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this article has already made the rounds here, but I still think about it. I love using em dashes! It really makes me sad that I need to avoid them now to sound human https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes

I don't think you do. All this LLM written crap is easily spottable without it. Nearly every paragraph has a heading, numerous sentences that start with one or two words of fluff then a colon then the actual statement. Excessive bullet point lists. Always telling you "here's the key insight". But really the only damning thing is, you get a few paragraphs in and realize there's no motivation. It's just a slick infodum…

Maybe, but that doesn’t stop people on the internet (and HN is no exception) of immediately dismissing something as LLM writing just because of an em-dash, no matter how passionate the text is.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#239

Post by TeMPOraL »

immibis wrote: post #234
TeMPOraL wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tied to what? Show us a way to create a provably, cryptographically integrity-preserving chain from a person's thoughts to those thoughts expressed in a digital medium, and you may just get both the Nobel prize and a trial for crimes against humanity, for the same thing.

It was a joke.

Ya think?

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#240

Post by [deleted] »

whitten wrote: post #171
astrange wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't always em-dash. I expect it's intentional as a watermark. Other buzzwords you can spot are "wild" and "vibes".

So if the vibes are wild, I’m not a hippie but an AI ? Cool. Is that an upgrade or &endash; or not ?

[deleted]
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