As humans and AI models roam the internet, they encounter lots of junk: clickbait headlines, misinformation, hashtags. Research by Dr. Zhengzhong Tu and his colleagues indicates that this junk-filled environment could be a cause for concern.
"Brain rot" has emerged as a term to describe cognitive changes—like diminished attention spans—in humans who engage with an abundance of frivolous, attention-grabbing content. Tu, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, found that when large language models (LLMs) train on junk data, they can get brain rot, too.
This research was presented at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2026) held in San Francisco, Oct. 6–9. The paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.
"The main message from this research is that the language models can pick up some bad cognitive habits from the low-quality information from social media, similar to how people can be influenced by trivial, clickbait content," said Shuo Xing, one of Tu's doctoral students and a lead author on the paper.
Gee, ya think?
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