From a new piece at Wired, “AI Models Get Brain Rot, Too“:

A new study from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University shows that large language models fed a diet of popular but low-quality social media content experience a kind of “brain rot” that may be familiar to anyone who has spent too long doomscrolling on X or TikTok.

After describing the test:

The models fed junk text experienced a kind of AI brain rot—with cognitive decline including reduced reasoning abilities and degraded memory. The models also became less ethically aligned and more psychopathic according to two measures.