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Unplug Your AI: Junk Internet Data Is Rotting LLM Brains
Your Model Is What It Eats: What Happens When LLMs Train on the Worst Parts of the Internet
In internet culture, the term brain rot refers to the detrimental effect on human cognition of consuming a large volume of online content (especially from social media). Internet addiction appears to have a significant effect on human cognition, especially on attention span (reduced ability to maintain focus when reading and solving problems), memory processes (alterations in how an individual stores, retrieves, and prioritizes knowledge), and social cognition (modification of self-concepts and influencing self-esteem).
Since LLMs learn from enormous amounts of data that have a large amount of internet content, can they also experience brain rot?
Given their training with enormous amounts of tokens, LLMs are exposed to a huge amount of junk data, just like humans. Although LLMs do not have “neurons” and “cerebral cortex” like humans, they have both parameters and attention mechanisms that might analogously be ‘overfitted’ or “distracted” by certain data patterns.
