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LLMs can get "brain rot"

(llm-brain-rot.github.io)
466 points tamnd | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 14:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rriley ◴[21 Oct 25 16:40 UTC] No.45657938[source]▶
This paper makes me wonder the long lasting effects of the current media consumption patterns by the alpha-gen kids.
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AznHisoka ◴[21 Oct 25 16:42 UTC] No.45657948[source]▶
why just kids?
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rriley ◴[21 Oct 25 16:46 UTC] No.45658012[source]▶
I am mostly concerned with the irreversibility part. More developed brains probably would not be affected as much.
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vanderZwan ◴[21 Oct 25 17:14 UTC] No.45658430[source]▶
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=ses...

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1. ordu ◴[21 Oct 25 18:23 UTC] No.45659584[source]▶
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