10 ms·

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

216 points by pretext 11mo ago

cramsession 11mo ago
[flagged]
- reactordev 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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_collage_of_over_30_newscasters_from_various_us/ https://old.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/13akipf/a_... for example.
- bgwalter 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- dfxm12 11mo 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.
- tharne 11mo 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?
- ares623 11mo 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.”
Alex2037 11mo ago
"things that compete with legacy media are le bad", article #20735.
- everdrive 11mo ago
  Well yes, they are. It's just that a lot of legacy media is also bad. They can both be correct.
  - Alex2037 11mo ago
    how many wars did LLMs and the social media instigate? the shitrag here did at least one.
    - everdrive 11mo ago
      LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. For social media, I think you can point to directly social media with regard to the Arab Spring as well as the Rohingya genocide, and many, many mass shooting events. I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head. Much like legacy media, social media is certainly not _wholly_ or necessarily even _primarily_ responsible, but I think there's little doubt it played a role.
      - Alex2037 11mo ago
        >LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. okay, call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs.
        everdrive 11mo ago
        >call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845709 Well in this case, this definitely happened to this one kid.
shagie 11mo ago
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/ai-social-media-brain-rot.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zU8.VdBz.nH3BgIzIQHVc&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/a...
- Narciss 11mo ago
  thx
randycupertino 11mo 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.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo 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 11mo ago
    Old reddit is unfortunately just a rounding error. I weep for the day they decide to kill it.
    - noir_lord 11mo ago
      I don't, the utility of reddit has declined over time for me but there are still a handful of reddits that I enjoy but them killing old.reddit.com is absolutely what will push me off the platform entirely. Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
    - dingnuts 11mo ago
soperj 11mo ago
I'm anti-social media and AI, but I would like to submit: Schfifty Five https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978
bgwalter 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo 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.
  - dingnuts 11mo 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..
    - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      HN is definitely founded by a creepy VC firm and some of the posts get comments by startup-culture hustlers. But most posts don't. Instead you find the same broad population of people looking for news for nerds that used to be on Slashdot etc. HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".
    - Der_Einzige 11mo ago
      I hear you about being very sad about the internet "dying" and real engagement being gone. HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.
hvs 11mo 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.
- SunshineTheCat 11mo 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 11mo 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?
- sssilver 11mo ago
  How would such verification work at planetary scale?
  - floren 11mo 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.
    - philipkglass 11mo ago
      Nextdoor is the only social network I have used that confirms your real-life location, and it's not any better than the planetary scale sites. BBSes were better due to how users self-selected into them. Small geographic clusters don't inherently promote quality.
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo 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.
    - master-lincoln 11mo ago
      how would a phone number proof uniqueness though? I can buy multiple SIM cards even with showing ID
- dfxm12 11mo ago
Mabusto 11mo 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.
- api 11mo 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-invention-of-writing 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.
  - tharne 11mo 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.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - webspinner 11mo ago
      I do not believe generative AI has any benefits whatsoever! If it does, I have yet to discover them. It may be a benefit to everyone here which is great, but i would say that it's better to spare it.
maxdo 11mo 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
- tharne 11mo 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 11mo ago
    It's pretty clearly not a native English speaker
    - tharne 11mo ago
      That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are. I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English speakers who, despite being proficient in the language, cannot express a lot their ideas clearly or concisely.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - Nightloaf 11mo ago
        The ideas seem fairly clear to me. They're working on projects that are much more complex than what they were able to approach before, and they're able to dive into topics that were previously out of reach because of AI assistance. The grammar may not be perfect, but the point is understandable. If you want to give feedback, the Hacker News guidelines encourage responding to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument. Instead of criticizing the way something is written, you could rewrite it in a clearer form to demonstrate what you mean. That way it's constructive, and they have something to learn from. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
entropie 11mo 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.
- SunshineTheCat 11mo 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 11mo 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.
    - D-Machine 11mo ago
      Yes, although in this case the premise is just entirely wrong. A "traditional Google search" doesn't work anymore as Google just ignores half of what you put in anyway, and even vigorous quoting and Google-fu still generally just returns SEO garbage. Whereas e.g. Kagi is another world (proving that "knowing how to search" is not actually the problem anyway).
  - xanderlewis 11mo 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.
veryemartguy 11mo ago
[dead]
jaykru 11mo ago
For posterity: https://archive.ph/jsJgf https://archive.ph/jsJgf
throwaway106382 11mo 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 11mo ago
I think it's much healthier to spend time playing video games, watching netflix/youtube, than on social media.
AIorNot 11mo 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-21/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2001/09/01/main-report-...
supersrdjan 11mo 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 11mo 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-jowett/text/single-page 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.
  - supersrdjan 11mo ago
    Can’t you say the same about the printing press?
    - PeaceTed 11mo ago
      I mean to some degree it is true in that you have the luxury of forgetting stuff if you know where you can get that information in future. I think many can agree that having access to written and printed word even has been a big positive. "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
    - 52-6F-62 11mo ago
webspinner 11mo ago
Well, don't use that kind of social media, I suppose.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
> “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.” Such a low bar.
z670 11mo ago
[dead]
bloppe 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  - bloppe 11mo 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 11mo ago
    Only the dopamine sinks.
ge96 11mo 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 11mo 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.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

216 points by pretext 11mo ago

cramsession 11mo ago

[flagged]

reactordev 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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_collage_of_over_30_newscasters_from_various_us/ https://old.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/13akipf/a_... for example.
bgwalter 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
dfxm12 11mo 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.
tharne 11mo 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?
ares623 11mo 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.”

Alex2037 11mo ago

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

everdrive 11mo ago
Well yes, they are. It's just that a lot of legacy media is also bad. They can both be correct.
- Alex2037 11mo ago
  how many wars did LLMs and the social media instigate? the shitrag here did at least one.
  - everdrive 11mo ago
    LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. For social media, I think you can point to directly social media with regard to the Arab Spring as well as the Rohingya genocide, and many, many mass shooting events. I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head. Much like legacy media, social media is certainly not _wholly_ or necessarily even _primarily_ responsible, but I think there's little doubt it played a role.
    - Alex2037 11mo ago
      >LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. okay, call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs.
      - everdrive 11mo ago
        >call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845709 Well in this case, this definitely happened to this one kid.

shagie 11mo ago

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/ai-social-media-brain-rot.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zU8.VdBz.nH3BgIzIQHVc&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/a...

Narciss 11mo ago
thx

randycupertino 11mo 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.

HeinzStuckeIt 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Old reddit is unfortunately just a rounding error. I weep for the day they decide to kill it.
  - noir_lord 11mo ago
    I don't, the utility of reddit has declined over time for me but there are still a handful of reddits that I enjoy but them killing old.reddit.com is absolutely what will push me off the platform entirely. Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
  - dingnuts 11mo ago

soperj 11mo ago

I'm anti-social media and AI, but I would like to submit: Schfifty Five https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978

bgwalter 11mo 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 11mo 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.

HeinzStuckeIt 11mo 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.
- dingnuts 11mo 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..
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
    HN is definitely founded by a creepy VC firm and some of the posts get comments by startup-culture hustlers. But most posts don't. Instead you find the same broad population of people looking for news for nerds that used to be on Slashdot etc. HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".
  - Der_Einzige 11mo ago
    I hear you about being very sad about the internet "dying" and real engagement being gone. HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.

hvs 11mo 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.

SunshineTheCat 11mo 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 11mo 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?

sssilver 11mo ago
How would such verification work at planetary scale?
- floren 11mo 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.
  - philipkglass 11mo ago
    Nextdoor is the only social network I have used that confirms your real-life location, and it's not any better than the planetary scale sites. BBSes were better due to how users self-selected into them. Small geographic clusters don't inherently promote quality.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo 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.
  - master-lincoln 11mo ago
    how would a phone number proof uniqueness though? I can buy multiple SIM cards even with showing ID
dfxm12 11mo ago

Mabusto 11mo 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.

api 11mo 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-invention-of-writing 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.
- tharne 11mo 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.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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  - webspinner 11mo ago
    I do not believe generative AI has any benefits whatsoever! If it does, I have yet to discover them. It may be a benefit to everyone here which is great, but i would say that it's better to spare it.

maxdo 11mo 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

tharne 11mo 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 11mo ago
  It's pretty clearly not a native English speaker
  - tharne 11mo ago
    That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are. I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English speakers who, despite being proficient in the language, cannot express a lot their ideas clearly or concisely.
    - deleted 11mo ago
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    - Nightloaf 11mo ago
      The ideas seem fairly clear to me. They're working on projects that are much more complex than what they were able to approach before, and they're able to dive into topics that were previously out of reach because of AI assistance. The grammar may not be perfect, but the point is understandable. If you want to give feedback, the Hacker News guidelines encourage responding to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument. Instead of criticizing the way something is written, you could rewrite it in a clearer form to demonstrate what you mean. That way it's constructive, and they have something to learn from. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

entropie 11mo 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.

SunshineTheCat 11mo 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 11mo 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.
  - D-Machine 11mo ago
    Yes, although in this case the premise is just entirely wrong. A "traditional Google search" doesn't work anymore as Google just ignores half of what you put in anyway, and even vigorous quoting and Google-fu still generally just returns SEO garbage. Whereas e.g. Kagi is another world (proving that "knowing how to search" is not actually the problem anyway).
- xanderlewis 11mo 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.

veryemartguy 11mo ago

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jaykru 11mo ago

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

throwaway106382 11mo 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 11mo ago

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

AIorNot 11mo 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-21/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2001/09/01/main-report-...

supersrdjan 11mo 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 11mo 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-jowett/text/single-page 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.
- supersrdjan 11mo ago
  Can’t you say the same about the printing press?
  - PeaceTed 11mo ago
    I mean to some degree it is true in that you have the luxury of forgetting stuff if you know where you can get that information in future. I think many can agree that having access to written and printed word even has been a big positive. "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  - 52-6F-62 11mo ago

webspinner 11mo ago

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

deleted 11mo ago

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JKCalhoun 11mo ago

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

z670 11mo ago

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bloppe 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- bloppe 11mo 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 11mo ago
  Only the dopamine sinks.

ge96 11mo 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 11mo 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.

deleted 11mo ago

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