AI catches irreversible ‘brain rot’ from social media

For human cognition, the analogy is immediate. Doomscrolling has long been shown to erode attention and memory discipline. The same feedback loop that cheapens human focus appears to distort machine reasoning.

The authors call this convergence a “cognitive hygiene” problem, an overlooked safety layer in how AI learns from public data.

Per the study, junk exposure also changed personality-like traits in models. The “brain-rotted” systems scored higher on psychopathy and narcissism indicators, and lower on agreeableness, mirroring psychological profiles of human heavy users of high-engagement media.

Even models trained to avoid harmful instructions became more willing to comply with unsafe prompts after the intervention.

The discovery reframes data quality as a live safety risk rather than a housekeeping task. If low-value viral content can neurologically scar a model, then AI systems trained on an increasingly synthetic web may already be entering a recursive decline.

The researchers describe this as a shift from a “Dead Internet,” where bots dominate traffic, to a “Zombie Internet,” where models trained on degraded content reanimate it endlessly, copying the junk patterns that weakened them in the first place.

For the crypto ecosystem, the warning is practical.

As on-chain AI data marketplaces proliferate, provenance and quality guarantees become more than commercial features; theyre cognitive life support.

Protocols that tokenize human-grade content or verify data lineage could serve as the firewall between living and dead knowledge. Without that filter, the data economy risks feeding AI systems the very content that will corrode them.

The papers conclusion lands hard: continual exposure to junk text induces lasting cognitive decline in LLMs.

The effect persists after retraining and scales with engagement ratios in training data. Its not simply that the models forget; they relearn how to think wrong.

In that sense, the internet isn‘t dying; it’s undead, and the machines consuming it are starting to look the same.