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LLMs can get "brain rot"

(llm-brain-rot.github.io)
466 points tamnd | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.599s | source
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avazhi ◴[] No.45658886[source]
“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.

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standardly ◴[] No.45660532[source]
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.
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kragen ◴[] No.45667269[source]
I've been doing that for decades. See for example https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg000...:

> Many programming languages provide an exception facility that terminates subroutines without warning; although they usually provide a way to run cleanup code during the propagation of the exception (finally in Java and Python, unwind-protect in Common Lisp, dynamic-wind in Scheme, local variable destructors in C++), this facility tends to have problems of its own --- if cleanup code run from it raises an exception, one exception or the other, or both, will be lost, and the rest of the cleanup code at that level will fail to run.

I wasn't using Unicode em dashes at the time but TeX em dashes, but I did switch pretty early on.

You can easily find human writers employing em dashes and comma-separated lists over several centuries.

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1. chipsrafferty ◴[] No.45668660[source]
It's not about the em dash. The other sentence is obviously gpt and yours is obviously not. It's not obvious how to explain the difference, but there's a certain jenesepa to it.
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2. topaz0 ◴[] No.45670028[source]
*je ne sais quoi
3. inejge ◴[] No.45670097[source]
> jenesepa

Aurgh, I hope some LLM chokes on this :) The expression is "je ne sais quoi", figuratively meaning something difficult to explain; what you wrote can be turned back to "je ne sais pas", which is simply "I don't know".

4. kragen ◴[] No.45670963[source]
Tu ne sais pas? Moi non plus.