A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/ai-social-media-brain-rot.html

by pretext • 9 months ago

216 191 9 months ago

[flagged]

reactordev• 9 months ago

Exactly. The article should just say “Mass consumption of media causes brain rot” because since 1900 that’s all it’s doing.

Radio programs that caused mass hysteria. TV advertising that caused people to cook plastics into their food. The advertisements for hair loss. For ED. For testosterone, for bunions, warts, insomnia, apnea, eczema, droopy eye, eye bags, teeth, dogs teeth, cats bum, extended car warranty, leasing a car, phones, computers, vbros, and all those TikTok “hacks” which are just mcguyver poor people hacks.

Brain rot comes from watching others live their lives…

Get outside, do something.

gdulli• 9 months ago

Past media may have prepped us with some brain rot that's now causing people to prostrate themselves to the tech giants in exchange for not having to work as hard. But that doesn't mean that an acceleration of social media, slop, and loss of transparency on the information we take in isn't going to be extremely worse.

AaronAPU• 9 months ago

Reading this, I have no idea which of the thousands of new media silos you inhabit. But they all tell different mutually exclusive narratives.

So statistically, even if one is purely honest and accurate, most likely you aren’t in that one particular silo.

CamperBob2• 9 months ago

Trouble is, the "silos" in both new and traditional media aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. See https://old.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/13akipf/a_... for example.

bgwalter2• 9 months ago

Yet anti-war protests were orders of magnitude stronger in the 1980s, Iran Contra was treated like real scandal [1] and politicians occasionally had to resign for misbehavior. Political awareness was much stronger than now and economic issues had far more screen time.

The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.

[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.

dougb5• 9 months ago

As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.

lm28469• 9 months ago

it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation

less ?

We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...

If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.

dfxm122• 9 months ago

Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation.

Don't discount the effect of lead in paint, pipes, gasoline, etc. It's not a surprise that Republicans try to roll back regulations that remove lead.

tharne7• 9 months ago

What is the argument being made here? That we've done stupid and damaging things to our brains in the past so we just stop worrying and just double down?

ares6232• 9 months ago

Been seeing this argument more and more. Is there a name for it?

“Bad thing X has been happening forever.

AI _guarantees_ X will exponentially get worse, but it lets me do (arguably) good thing Y so it’s okay.”

Alex20374• 9 months ago

"things that compete with legacy media are le bad", article #20735.

everdrive3• 9 months ago

Well yes, they are. It's just that a lot of legacy media is also bad. They can both be correct.

Alex20374• 9 months ago

how many wars did LLMs and the social media instigate? the shitrag here did at least one.

shagie• 9 months ago

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/a...

Narciss• 9 months ago

thx

randycupertino2• 9 months ago

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page.

There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining, "hey buddy take your ai-spam elsewhere" but all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!" I just ended up blocking this dude but I am sad for humanity lol.

HeinzStuckeIt8• 9 months ago

On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them.

I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.

Espressosaurus• 9 months ago

Old reddit is unfortunately just a rounding error. I weep for the day they decide to kill it.

sssilver2• 9 months ago

My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!

rurp• 9 months ago

I don't know how anyone can use the official reddit mobile app for more than 5 minutes. Between the ads and terrible interface it's an awful experience. But I also hate facebook so I'm clearly not the target audience for this stuff.

RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.

derbOac• 9 months ago

Maybe I'm in the minority, but with ad blockers I never see ads on Reddit. I honestly don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit at all, with a tiny exception for ads for other Reddit offerings, which is very recent for me.

Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.

shortrounddev2• 9 months ago

I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are

1. Car crashes

2. Street/bum fights

3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)

4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")

5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)

Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level

stdclass• 9 months ago

since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies

maybe you find a suitable board on 4chan

webspinner20• 9 months ago

I'm leaving Reddit because of all this!

kevin_thibedeau• 9 months ago

There are Firefox extensions that monkeypatch the old UI with usability enhancements and force a redirect for all reddit links.

damnesian• 9 months ago

I never use the app, only login to old. and when old is taken away, I will take my marbles and go home.

port112• 8 months ago

My theory is that Reddit as a community-builder died when their moderator crisis started, prompted by the API pricing issue. I swear I haven't seen a funny, Redditesque thread since then. No copypastas, none of the old memes. It's all slop, meaningless comments, and generic content these days. Endless reposts. I don't know what happened to Reddit…

knicholes• 9 months ago

I've found a page on Facebook that regularly posts single white mothers with black babies on supposed dating profiles with very demanding requirements for men. The comments are loaded with people saying that they deserve their current situation, enforcing racial stereotypes, etc. It's not hard to see that these are AI generated, as there are maybe 5-8 posts a day like this, and the images are pretty clearly AI generated. Regardless, they get the engagement, and they sell the shirts. Easy way to automate a business, I guess, but at what cost?!

stuartjohnson12• 9 months ago

Could you give me some searching clues to hunt down this or a similar profile?

wslh• 9 months ago

Just a few hours ago, I was trying to find the profile of an excellent swimmer I met at dinner yesterday. I knew his first name and the club he swims in, so I searched his name together with the club and "swimming" on Instagram without using the keyword club. Almost all the results were attractive girls posing in swimsuits, but none were actual amateur swimmers. The guy I was looking for didn't appear at all.

BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.

daveguy3• 9 months ago

...I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.

This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.

pier25• 9 months ago

all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!"

Probably bots?

ryandrake2• 9 months ago

I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content! But everyone else in my life thinks it's great, and sometimes don't believe me when I point out it's obviously AI generated. I think people are already totally fooled and think it's real.

mediaman• 9 months ago

Cultural antibodies take a long time to develop. In twenty years you will see more common resistance to what's being produced today, but less to whatever new innovation is released then.

See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.

webspinner20• 9 months ago

I have the exact same response!

chemotaxis• 9 months ago

I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content!

I instinctively want to blame AI, but on some level, I think the problem runs deeper: it's that we are for some reason compelled to consume content where it just doesn't matter if it's real or not. It has no bearing on your life. You just want to spend your time scrolling through heartwarming stories about complete strangers, or through rage-bait that reinforces your political beliefs. Ethically, I see a difference between telling you true stories and lies. But if we're being honest with ourselves... what changes if the kitten rescued from a storm sewer is actually just gen AI?

This isn't even a Facebook thing. 24-hour news networks and many newspapers perfected this craft before. Endless streams of celebrity gossip and stories about stranded / rescued pets, written for no reason other than to satisfy this weird craving among the readers.

Each step along the way lowers the bar for feeding you the content and allows it to be tailored better, but I don't know what the fix here is. Short of banning the internet and forcing people to go outside more.

Esophagus4• 9 months ago

I will admit, I consider myself pretty tech savvy and I am having a harder time these days identifying AI-generated content (aside from the obvious ones).

I find myself squinting hard at interior design pictures on Pinterest to see if they’re real, I can never be sure with an instagram video, and even blogs and comments are getting harder to tell.

And I think the fact that I am having a harder time distinguishing reality from AI worries me greatly that I would be susceptible to misinformation if I venture outside of trusted sources.

Forgeties79• 9 months ago

Moderators really need to start cracking down on this stuff. If nothing else just posts per week limits or something.

tarsinge• 9 months ago

Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).

thih9• 9 months ago

Funny to complain about content marketing that happens outside of HN, when content marketing is so popular here.

E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661253

mihaic• 9 months ago

I think it's not at all self-contradicting.

HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.

Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.

yieldcrv• 9 months ago

in a local facebook group for my town ... [someone posts AI promos]
I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining

people are less confrontational the more local it is

keiferski• 9 months ago

I think it’s a generational thing. Younger people don’t really use Facebook very much and are much more active on TikTok and instagram, both of which I would describe as semi-hostile to AI, or at least the kind of lazy slop AI you’re talking about.

Bombthecat• 9 months ago

The internet will be more and more ai stuff.

At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.

Mars008• 9 months ago

Have you seen sci-fi movies? It's all fake! And people are happy with this. Same here, it becomes annoying only after some time. Most didn't get to this point yet. By the time they get quality will be better, so like new again. After that even adults will have hard time telling apart reality from generated. Like little kids believe dreams are true.

yen2232• 9 months ago

Those comments are probably AI as well

webspinner20• 9 months ago

I'm actually writing fairly literally lol! If you want me to write more in-depth comments, I sure can! I'm not stupid enough to go generate them like you might be, I suppose. In fact, I think the whole thing is ridiculous, so I try to avoid it entirely!!

soperj• 9 months ago

I'm anti-social media and AI, but I would like to submit:

Schfifty Five https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978

bgwalter2• 9 months ago

"AI" absolutely contributes to brain rot. Google "AI" is just a status quo propagandist that makes things up, misunderstands questions and berates the "user" if the "user" dares to contradict. It is worse than any legacy media. It also weaves in how awesome "AI" is and how the "user" should treat "AI" with respect, preferably like a human.

You should definitely keep minors away from this dangerous brainwashing.

Even better "AI"s lead to outsourcing of thought, search capabilities, speed reading and critical reflection.

monospacegames• 9 months ago

It's funny how multiple commenters here are reacting to this article by saying that older media is also bad when the article itself is about specific observations about how relying on AI and overengaging in social media can lead to detrimental outcomes.

Ironically this tendency to form an opinion without investing time might also be a form of brain rot.

HeinzStuckeIt8• 9 months ago

Using a HN post to talk about something unrelated you wanted to talk about anyway, has been part of HN for years. Probably because a lot of people feel with the rise of 140-character type social media, there are fewer and fewer venues on the internet where you can substantially talk to educated and non-brand-hustling people about the things that you think about.

dingnuts2• 9 months ago

this website exists as an advertisement for a brand. the people here are hustling harder than anywhere! it's worse than LinkedIn! that's why this website is a constant dick measuring contest -- it's a news site run by a venture capitalist firm about startups!

Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills?

the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..

Karrot_Kream4• 9 months ago

Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!!

Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that the news for nerds group is so desperate to find community that they glom onto every IRC and website they can is a bit sad but I guess it's the nature of online cultures. But oh yeah enshittificiation and the year of the Linux desktop is tomorrow and Meta is going down down down or something right?

On the other hand it's funny how folks who like that culture keep putting it on a pedestal. Why? It contains little predictive power. It teaches little. It's just about opining. Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions? I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

It's social media in a nutshell. We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. When that happens at scale, you lose mass consensus. HN is but one piece of that.

tekbruh9000• 9 months ago

Here's an example of how reliance on traditional media leads to detrimental outcomes: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.

I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.

webspinner20• 9 months ago

Oh, I don't exactly trust the NYT. But hey, I do read them once in a while. After that, I always do more research.

sureglymop2• 9 months ago

I don't really understand how they used "brainrot". I thought brain rot was this generations surrealism, a type of art?

By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because.

triMichael• 9 months ago

There are two types of "brainrot" that are related but not the same. Essentially brainrot is anything that is anti-thinking.

The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.

On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.

So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.

hvs• 9 months ago

Anything that contributes to you not needing to actually "think" and instead just "react" is going to be bad for you because it is simply engaging your reward system. The only way LLMs can be a net good is if they free you from drudgery and allow you to work harder on the things that actually matter. (Think dishwashers and laundry machines). If you are using them as an "easy button" so you can finish your work (poorly) to have more time to scroll your timeline then yes, you are turning your brain into mush.

I'm purposefully not engaging with whether LLMs are actually even good at what they do, which is another discussion.

SunshineTheCat2• 9 months ago

I think this is true of just about any technology. It will make lazy people lazier and help productive people get more done in less time. It's all about where the motivation is for each individual.

chaseadam17• 9 months ago

Why hasn't a social media platform with mandatory verification to prove users are unique humans taken off yet? Still too hard to break the existing network effects?

sssilver2• 9 months ago

How would such verification work at planetary scale?

floren• 9 months ago

Who cares about planetary scale? Back when your networking reach was largely limited by the size of your area code, local BBSes had user verification and were incredibly popular.

HeinzStuckeIt8• 9 months ago

Most platforms for the last decade have used phone numbers for real-human detection. Facebook is well known to quickly lock new signups' accounts until they give a phone number. Obviously that can be gamed by some people in some places, but all countries on earth have mobile phones now and purchase of a SIM card often requires showing ID to authorities.

dfxm122• 9 months ago

Anonymity is more important, and verification systems can always be gamed. To add, given what you see well known people post under their real name, including Trump posting a video of himself shitting all over Americans, I don't understand what benefit you're expecting to get.

pjc502• 9 months ago

That's Facebook. Just because it's mandatory doesn't mean people aren't going to cheat it. And cheating is the problem. Verifying that it's an actual human sitting at the keyboard is basically an exam proctoring level problem. Otherwise people will just produce vast farms of accounts.

AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.

(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)

Mabusto• 9 months ago

I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool.

Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.

api2• 9 months ago

Ancient Egyptians on writing:

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."

https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...

This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.

tharne7• 9 months ago

This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.

Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.

paddleon• 9 months ago

Curious if we could test/compare (popluation-level) memory skills before/after writing was introduced to the population.

I want to say "I remember things better when I write them down", and because I think I'm a smart person I think my memory is good.

I don't know how well I'd remember things if I'd spent a large portion of my life building memorization skills. Maybe I could be 100x better at memory if I exercised it more?

afavour• 9 months ago

Yes, IMO this is going to start becoming visible sooner rather than later. College students that defer to ChatGPT to form arguments for them are going to graduate, sit for an in-person job interview and discover they haven't had to think fast, with their own brain, in years. It won't be pretty.

ryandrake2• 9 months ago

But who is going to crack first? Will job applicants somehow remove their borg implants and learn to think on their own? Or will businesses give in and admit that nobody can think for themselves anymore, allowing applicants to use ChatGPT during their interviews (knowing that they're probably going to need to use it on the job, too).

tharne7• 9 months ago

Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.

I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.

As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.

gregates• 9 months ago

Unfortunately, "X is just a tool and is super useful when used properly, all things are both bad in excess and good in moderation, what you gonna do?" is exactly the type of conclusion that a chat bot is likely to reach. Doesn't really say anything, appears to express sophistication and wisdom by being more "nuanced" than an actual position, demands nothing of your audience, not likely to get downvotes on social media, etc.

MSFT_Edging• 9 months ago

Proper use of anything that has a big downside is in direct opposition to making money, sadly.

PetitPrince• 9 months ago

Steve Jobs "bicycle for the mind" analogy is more potent than I initially thought.

When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.

(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)

pjc502• 9 months ago

I don't think the "tool weakening" discourse is strong enough: it overlooks the aversarial nature of the modern internet. There are humans actively intending to weaken you for various reasons, either to sell you stuff or to weaken you ideologically by making you hate other humans such as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848215

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845772 "meta predicted 10% of revenue came from scams"

Barrin92• 9 months ago

You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither

I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.

And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.

People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.

daveguy3• 9 months ago

I believe you are thinking of the Vertiwalk lift:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYqHWDt5wRk

Liquix• 9 months ago

there seems to be a parallel with the industrial revolution - being fit and having muscles used to be the norm when everyone worked the fields all day. but now that grocery stores and sedentary jobs have made exercise optional. so choosing to pursue fitness signals to others that one is disciplined, takes pride in their appearance, etc.

i can see the next couple generations of AI agents causing the same effect on reading, critical thinking, and intelligence in general. thinking is no longer necessary with AI agents, so maybe cultivating one's ability to think will become optional/personal pursuits which send similar signals.

brailsafe2• 9 months ago

You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither

Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destinations and avenues separated from each other by noise, pollution, and danger. People may not physically atrophy to the point of having no leg muscles, but their tolerance for walking a km becomes much more strained and their appreciation for investment in public transport lessens. They don't see or speak to people as much because they're always in their portable silo. You burn less calories, it's easier to gain weight, and people discount the value in having a gym within walking distance.

It's tough to reconcile it with being a functional tool, because although I could conceivably use it as one and buy one, I know that it can become an addiction.

webspinner20• 9 months ago

Sure thing, sometimes it's fun! I suppose that's because I'm a thrillseeker. Let's see how fast it gets up to is a test. That wouldn't be the case if I were driving.

port112• 8 months ago

I noticed this in myself and had a pang of disgust at myself. I used to write almost daily, but with the baby we've had there hasn't been time. So recently when I was thinking of getting back on it, I went testing several writing helpers that are LLM-powered. I think it took me a few days to realise I was only doing it because it's easier and “everyone is doing it”. Like, I write for pleasure, why the hell do I need to automate part of the process?

maxdo• 9 months ago

I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past

tharne7• 9 months ago

I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past

This sentence is very poorly written and ironically is undermining the very case you're trying to make.

sdwr• 9 months ago

It's pretty clearly not a native English speaker

moravak1984• 9 months ago

You could add writing to that list of topics...

Nightloaf2• 9 months ago

Could you focus on contributing something meaningful to the discussion instead of adding snarky insults?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

entropie2• 9 months ago

“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

Well, this guy obviously didn't get the memo that Google search isn't what it was 10 years ago and is total junk.

It's not just AI brain rot. Brain rot is everywhere. Social media, linear TV, politics.

SunshineTheCat2• 9 months ago

“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it.

The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but humanity remains terrified at even the slightest upheaval of the status quo.

hitarpetar• 9 months ago

typical technological determinism. comparing AI to the motorcoach assumes something we cannot know yet, namely that the impact of AI on the next century will be comparable to the invention of the automobile. there's also a long list of negative externalities caused by automobiles. who cares? anyone hurt by climate change, or who lives in a grid organized around cars rather than people. anyone who has ever been killed in a car accident.

xanderlewis2• 9 months ago

a better way of doing something

Your argument fails right here because you're supposing something that isn't true. LLMs are better than search engines for some things, but you're speaking as if they're a replacement for what came before. They're absolutely not. Reading books — going to the original source rather than relying on a stochastic facsimile — is never going to go away, even if some of us are too lazy to ever do so. Their loss.

Put another way: leaving aside non-practical aspects of the experience, the car does a better job of getting you from A to B than a horse does. An LLM does not 'do a better job' than a book. Maybe in some cases it's more useful, but it's simply not a replacement. Perhaps a combination is best: use the LLM to interpolate and find your way around the literature, and then go and hunt down the real source material. The same cannot be said of the car/horse comparison.

jaykru• 9 months ago

For posterity: https://archive.ph/jsJgf

throwaway106382• 9 months ago

Contribute? That's basically its only purpose now, rot your brain with a dopamine drip and show you a bajillion ads. Now with AI slopgen being baked right into most of them it's been set into overdrive.

Deleted all my social media accounts except Youtube (but I use Unhook to remove everything except my subscriptions and the search). Haven't felt better. I use Telegram and Whatsapp and SMS to keep in touch with friends and family, nothing connected to any social app. I avoid all of the social-media-lite features in those apps like the plague.

carabiner• 9 months ago

I think it's much healthier to spend time playing video games, watching netflix/youtube, than on social media.

AIorNot• 9 months ago

I found this in the article to be pretty funny

“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

20 years ago I remember all the scary articles/studies about the web ruining education.

e.g

Net cheaters (from link below)

The ease of gathering information on the Internet has a darker side. The simplicity of finding out things on the Web also makes it easy for students to cheat. Cutting and pasting text from a Web site and into a paper is effortless. So is wholesale copying or purchasing finished essays or reports. About a fifth of online youth (18%) say they know of someone who has used the Internet to cheat on a paper or test. While 9% of those who have been online for a year or less know someone who has cheated, 19% of those who have been online for 2 to 3 years and 28% of those who have been online for more than three years know people who have used the Net to cheat

from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2001/09/01/main-report-...

supersrdjan3• 9 months ago

Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.

If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.

District5524• 9 months ago

That still seems to be a problem. It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued). At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.

supersrdjan3• 9 months ago

Can’t you say the same about the printing press?

ares6232• 9 months ago

You/me in your/my current state are/is the single most important thing in the world.

kjkjadksj4• 9 months ago

Socrates is probably right. There are probably entirely different connections being made in ones brain in an oral culture vs written culture. Socrates was alive to see the transition where these differences in manners of brain activity were readily apparent, unlike today where all educated people are already “ruined” by writing and there is no control possible.

I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.

supersrdjan3• 9 months ago

I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.

But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.

I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?

webspinner20• 9 months ago

Well, don't use that kind of social media, I suppose.

JKCalhoun• 9 months ago

“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

Such a low bar.

bloppe3• 9 months ago

The wishful cynic in me sometimes thinks this might actually lead to a partial reversal of ageism in the workforce. It's almost starting to look like the kids graduating from school with chatgpt are actually handicapped (painting in extremely broad strokes; there will always be prodigies) and those who graduated or worked before 2022 will actually become more desirable to hire.

I'm sure this take is at best oversimplified. Probably mostly wrong. But it's certainly something I will think about while hiring from now on

eboynyc32• 9 months ago

Such bs! Every new tech causes the disgrace of society! Music, films, dancing, comic books, the internet. Everything is always evil except the bible of course.

bloppe3• 9 months ago

A recent Stanford grad just told me "it's all just bots talking to bots", referring to students who use ChatGPT to do all their homework, and teachers who use ChatGPT to grade the work that was submitted by ChatGPT. And because of the pandemic, somehow people think it's now reasonable to do standardized testing in private with internet access. It's an anecdote, but she was really dissatisfied with her experience there. And that's one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

Do you have a different experience in academia recently?

Adopting LLMs is easy. I use Claude code for tons of stuff, but I'm very grateful it wasn't around when I was in school and starting out in the industry.

conception• 9 months ago

Only the dopamine sinks.

ge96• 9 months ago

Funny I've been trying to quit reddit and I'm just like "what do I do with my time" I usually have two windows: reddit on the left and YT on the right. I work 7 days a week and haven't made anything for myself code/hardware wise in a while.

I think of this concept living second hand through other people's lives (social media) it's not living your own

oldsklgdfth• 9 months ago

Lumping AI together with social media is confusing for me. One is a tool for the user, the other is not.

If social media is a tool for anything, it is for the company to generate ad revenue. Sure there is value someone can extract (keeping in touch family). But I can also extract value from junk mail (using it as scrap paper for notes and lists.)

AI is still a tool. I think? I have not seen any direct way that monetizes it through ads, yet. I expect AI with a revenue model will look way worse.

AI is turning people dumb. I see it all the time with code slop. It's the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish". Maybe a tool-using approach to AI is "should me how to do this", rather than "do this for me". "Show me an example of some code" is more useful to me than unleashing it on my project.

Also, social media is obviously a sort of digital narcotic. Probably should be scheduled.

A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

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