AI Can Experience Brain Rot, Too

Generative AI is showing signs of mental erosion, and the culprit feels eerily familiar. A joint study from UT Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue found that large language models trained on mountains of low-quality, viral social content suffered real, measurable declines: Reasoning dropped by 23%, long-context memory by nearly a third, and personality-profile metrics revealed spikes in narcissism and psychopathy. Even after retraining on cleaner data, a form of “representational drift” lingered. 

The implication is stark: garbage in doesn’t just create garbage out; brain rot is now afflicting artificial minds, too.

Of course, the rot started with us. In humans, “brain rot” is more than a meme; it’s a measurable condition. Heavy exposure to short-form video correlates with higher anxiety and depression. Stanford researchers even found measurable drops in attention among chronic doomscrollers. The new paper has implications for marketers using AI, because it means that bad data in means bad data out. A viral X thread about the study called it “the most disturbing AI paper of 2025,” noting that even after retraining, models still “believe fiction becomes fact if it’s popular enough.” The top reply put it bluntly: “I’ve already begun to notice that Grok spews pure BS because it learned from viral posts that everyone interacted with.”  

The cultural moment is self-aware enough to joke about it. On TikTok, #BrainRot has surpassed 3 million posts, with more than 117k in the past week alone. Creators are staging “brain rot Halloween” content. On LinkedIn, one viral analysis broke down the phenomenon as a “holy trinity of unseriousness, repetition, and low effort,” arguing that each generation inherits a higher baseline of chaos. (Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, fittingly, was “brain rot.”) Even Wikipedia’s entry on the term has been locked until 2026 due to excessive vandalism, in a form of meta-commentary on the idea itself.  

In Rabbit Holed, Pitchfork’s digital-culture column, creators are remixing Marxist TikTok edits to “displace alt-right slop”—proof that ideological performance has become another flavor of internet decay. And the parody world of Floptropica now bills itself as the next frontier of meta-brain-rot art. The line between critique and participation has never been thinner.

Why it matters: If AI is now succumbing to the same cognitive erosion as its creators, it underscores an importance truth: quality inputs are everything. As culture and cognition collapse into noise, audiences are starving for signal. In a post-rot world, the pursuit of cool no longer cuts through. The new cultural capital isn’t clout, it’s clarity. 

Other news and trends

• Natural disasters: Hurricane Melissa makes landfall. Jamaica began trending earlier this week on X, with almost 200k posts, as Hurricane Melissa made landfall near New Hope as a catastrophic Category 5 storm. It was the most powerful hurricane on record to strike the island and, with winds reaching 185 mph and a pressure of 892 mb, Melissa ties the record for the strongest landfalling hurricane in history. The story is still updating, but there are already at least 30 deaths and millions more imperiled flooding, storm surges, and infrastructure collapse across the Caribbean.
• Trending on X: GrokPedia vs. Wikipedia. Wikipedia is trending with nearly 100k posts following the launch of GrokPedia, Elon Musk’s AI encyclopedia built by xAI’s Grok model. The site launched with 885,279 articles before briefly crashing and returning online the same day. The layout mirrors Wikipedia’s interface but replaces user edits with AI-managed citations and summaries. Many entries were confirmed to have been adapted directly from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Wikimedia responded that “Wikipedia’s knowledge is—and always will be—human.” On X, users accused GrokPedia of copying word for word, argued that its content contradicts Musk’s free-speech stance, and mocked the platform for using Kremlin sources as citations.
• Trending across platforms: Amazon layoffs. “Amazon Layoffs” is trending on Threads, with 54k posts, after the company announced plans to cut 14,000 corporate roles. SVP of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti cited AI-driven productivity and a need for leaner teams, calling the move essential for “faster innovation.” Analysts noted this could mark the company’s largest corporate layoff in history. A LinkedIn post comparing Amazon’s move to Target’s 1,000 job cuts went viral, framing both as signs of a “flattening corporate structure” trend; another Amazon alum on LinkedIn asked, “How is this all supposed to work in the long term when workers take all the risk while owners and leaders take all the reward?” Commentators tied the news to a broader conversation about whether automation and AI are fueling a creative recession.
• Related: Paramount layoffs. Following its $8B merger with Skydance, Paramount will cut roughly 1,000 U.S. jobsthis week—the first of two rounds. Leadership previously warned of deep reductions and is reportedly pursuing talks with Warner Bros. Discovery as industry consolidation accelerates. The cuts follow comments from CEO Jeff Shell, who pledged not to make layoffs “a quarterly event,” though insiders expect further reductions abroad.
• Trending on BlueSky: Tylenol lawsuit. Tylenol is trending on BlueSky with over 2k posts after Texas sued Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue, alleging the companies hid information about potential links between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and autism—a claim still unproven by medical experts. The lawsuit also asserts that Kenvue, spun off from J&J in 2023, was structured to shield its parent company from liability, reigniting debate around corporate responsibility and public health transparency.

Contributors: Chief Social & Innovation Officer Cristina Lawrence, Senior Vice President Jerry Lawrence, Group Vice President Andrew McKernan, and Senior Vice President Tammy Pepito. At Razorfish, we help brands define their higher purpose—the emotional reason why they belong in people’s lives. Ready to find your purpose? Learn more here