AI fashions could also be a bit like people, in any case.
A brand new study from the College of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue College reveals that enormous language fashions fed a weight loss program of common however low-quality social media content material expertise a form of “mind rot” that could be acquainted to anybody who has spent too lengthy doomscrolling on X or TikTok.
“We dwell in an age the place info grows quicker than consideration spans—and far of it’s engineered to seize clicks, not convey fact or depth,” says Junyuan Hong, an incoming assistant professor on the Nationwide College of Singapore who labored on the research as a graduate pupil at UT Austin. “We questioned: What occurs when AIs are educated on the identical stuff?”
Hong and his colleagues fed completely different sorts of textual content to 2 open supply massive language fashions in pretraining. They examined what occurred when the fashions had been fed a mixture of extremely “participating,” or broadly shared, social media posts and ones that contained sensational or hyped textual content like “wow,” “look,” or “as we speak solely.”
The researchers then used a number of completely different benchmarks to gauge the influence of this “junk” social media weight loss program on two open supply fashions: Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen.
The fashions fed junk textual content skilled a form of AI mind rot—with cognitive decline together with lowered reasoning skills and degraded reminiscence. The fashions additionally turned much less ethically aligned and extra psychopathic in accordance with two measures.
The outcomes mirror analysis on human topics, which shows that low-quality on-line content material has a detrimental effect on individuals’s cognitive skills. The pervasiveness of the phenomenon noticed “mind rot” named because the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2024.
The outcomes are essential for the AI trade, Hong says, as a result of model-builders may assume that social media posts are a superb supply of coaching knowledge for his or her fashions. “Coaching on viral or attention-grabbing content material could seem like scaling up knowledge,” he says. “However it could actually quietly corrode reasoning, ethics, and long-context consideration.”
The truth that LLMs undergo from mind rot appears particularly worrying when AI is itself more and more producing social media content material, a lot of which is seemingly optimized for engagement. The researchers additionally discovered that fashions impaired by low-quality content material couldn’t simply be improved via retraining.
The findings additionally recommend that AI methods constructed round social platforms, resembling Grok, may undergo from high quality management points if user-generated posts are utilized in coaching with out a watch towards the integrity of the posts.
“As extra AI-generated slop spreads throughout social media, it contaminates the very knowledge future fashions will study from,” Hong says. “Our findings present that when this type of ‘mind rot’ units in, later clear coaching can’t totally undo it.”
That is an version of Will Knight’s AI Lab e-newsletter. Learn earlier newsletters right here.
