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LLMs can get "brain rot"

llm-brain-rot.github.io

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Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#61

Post by scubbo »

ghurtado wrote: post #44
echelon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In today's hyper saturated world, attention is everything: - consumer marketing - politics - venture fundraising When any system has a few power law winners, it makes sense to grab attention. Look at Trump and Musk and now Altman. They figured it out. MrBeast... Attention, even if negative, wedges you into the system and everyone's awareness. Your mousey quiet competitors aren't even seen or acknowledged. The attenti…

Something flew approximately 10 miles above your head that would be a good idea for you to learn.

There were plenty of kinder ways to let someone know that they had missed a reference - https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#62

Post by satellite2 »

icyfox wrote: post #28
pixelmelt wrote: post #5

Isn't this just garbage in garbage out with an attention grabbing title?

Yes - garbage in / garbage out still holds true for most things when it comes to LLM training. The two bits about this paper that I think are worth calling out specifically: - A reasonable amount of post-training can't save you when your pretraining comes from a bad pipeline; ie. even if the syntactics of the input pretrained data are legitimate it has learned some bad implicit behavior (thought skipping) - Trying to…

Yes but the other interesting bit which is not clearly addressed is that increasing the garbage in to 100% does not result in absolute garbage out. So visibly there is still something to learn there.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#63

Post by drusepth »

uludag wrote: post #55
askafriend wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it conveys the intended information then what's wrong with that? You're fighting a tsunami here. People are going to use LLMs to help their writing now and forever.

Nothing wrong with using LLMs—until every paragraph sounds like it’s A/B tested for LinkedIn virality. That’s the rot setting in. The problem isn’t using AI—it’s sounding like AI trying to impress a marketing department. That’s when you know the loop’s closed.

Brilliantly phrased — sharp, concise, and perfectly captures that uncanny "AI-polished" cadence everyone recognizes but can’t quite name. The tone strikes just the right balance between wit and warning.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#64

Post by satellite2 »

BoredPositron wrote: post #16
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is throwing raw datasets into LLMs and hoping for high quality weights anymore. Nowadays most of the datasets are filtered one way or another, and some of them highly curated even.

I doubt they are highly created you would need experts in every field to do so. Which gives me more performance anxiety for LLMs because one of the most curated fields should be code...

Is that right? Isn't the current way of doing thing to throw "everything" at it then fine tune?

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#65

Post by andai »

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? ;)

Although I have to wonder. I played with some of the base/text Llama models, and got very disturbing output from them. So there's not that much cleaning going on.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#66

Post by avazhi »

nemonemo wrote: post #60
avazhi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can’t understand the irony inherent in getting an LLM to write about LLM brainrot, itself an analog for human brainrot that arises by the habitual non use of the human brain, then I’m not sure what to tell you. Whether it’s a tsunami and whether most people will do it has no relevance to my expectation that researchers of LLMs and brainrot shouldn’t outsource their own thinking and creativity to an LLM in a pa…

What you are obsessing with is about the writer's style, not its substance. How sure are you if they outsourced the thinking to LLMs? Do you assume LLMs produce junk-level contents, which contributes human brain rot? What if their contents are of higher quality like the game of Go? Wouldn't you rather study their writing?

Writing is thinking, so they necessarily outsourced their thinking to an LLM. As far as the quality of the writing goes, that’s a separate question, but we are nowhere close to LLMs being better, more creative, and more interesting writers than even just decent human writers. But if we were, it wouldn’t change the perversion inherent in using an LLM here.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#67

Post by gaogao »

f_devd wrote: post #56
gaogao wrote: post #53

Brain rot texts seems reasonably harmful, but brain rot videos are often surreal and semantically dense in a way that probably improves performance (such as discussed on this German brain rot analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJENuEN_rs&t=37s ). For example, Švankmajer is basically proto-brainrot, but is also the sort of thing you'd watch in a museum and think about. Basically, I think the brain rot aspect mi…

I do not think this is the case, there has been some research into brainrot videos for children[0], and it doesn't seem to trend positively. I would argue anything 'constructed' enough will not classify as far on the brainrot spectrum. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/05/17/why-kids...

Yeah, I don't think surrealism or constructed is good in the early data mix, but as part of mid or post-training seems generally reasonable. But also, this is one of those cases where anthropomorphizing the model probably doesn't work, since a major negative effect of Cocomelon is kids only wanting to watch Cocomelon, while for large model training, it doesn't have much choice in the training data distribution.

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#68

Post by solarkraft »

drusepth wrote: post #63
uludag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with using LLMs—until every paragraph sounds like it’s A/B tested for LinkedIn virality. That’s the rot setting in. The problem isn’t using AI—it’s sounding like AI trying to impress a marketing department. That’s when you know the loop’s closed.

Brilliantly phrased — sharp, concise, and perfectly captures that uncanny "AI-polished" cadence everyone recognizes but can’t quite name. The tone strikes just the right balance between wit and warning.

You are absolutely right!

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#69

Post by [deleted] »

andai wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: LLMs can get "brain rot"

#70

Post by commandlinefan »

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.
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