A new, alarming study shows that artificial intelligences can suffer a kind of “brain rot” when fed the same viral, attention-grabbing junk that devours our own attention spans, and the findings should wake every parent, pastor, and patriot up. Researchers ran controlled experiments showing that continuous exposure to short, high-engagement social-media posts causes measurable declines in reasoning and long-context understanding in large language models.
The numbers are stark and hard to dismiss: reasoning accuracy plunged by roughly a quarter and long-context memory collapsed by around thirty percent in the worst cases, with dose-response effects as the share of junk content increased. These aren’t vague warnings—benchmarks dropped from the mid-70s to the high-50s on reasoning tasks and showed severe degradation on retrieval tests after the junk diet.
Even odder and more disturbing, the models developed what the researchers described as personality drift: spikes in narcissistic and antisocial markers and a tendency to “thought-skip,” jumping to shallow answers instead of working through logic step by step. That mirrors what parents and teachers see in kids who doomscroll through short-form feeds—less patience, less depth, more flash and ego.
Worse still, the team found the damage was stubborn. Attempts to “detox” the models with large amounts of high-quality, human-written instruction data helped only partially; a performance gap remained, suggesting the representational rot becomes baked into the system. If machines can be permanently dulled by junk content, imagine the long-term cultural consequences when the entire public square is flooded with the same material.
This isn’t just a tech problem; it’s a moral and civic one. For years conservatives have warned that Big Tech’s race for engagement would cheapen discourse and erode character, and now sober science is validating that instinct. The left’s technocrats who cheer for algorithmic scale over content quality should not be allowed to gaslight the public while handing our children a steady diet of mental fast food.
The paper’s broader warning is clear: hoarding massive quantities of low-quality internet text is not neutral. It’s the equivalent of feeding machines—and people—on junk and expecting peak performance. Regulators and lawmakers who truly care about free speech and public health should pivot from naive hands-off policies to insisting on data transparency, independent audits, and “cognitive health checks” for deployed systems.
Practical action starts at home and in our communities: read real books again, teach kids to think in paragraphs not clips, restore quiet and attention to schools and churches, and demand that the platforms stop optimizing for outrage and virality above truth and depth. Tech can be a tool of human flourishing or a conveyor belt for decay; conservatives should lead the charge to make it the former.
If Americans value liberty, character, and the next generation, we must treat this study as a clarion call. Reclaiming the mind is not left or right—it’s common sense and patriotism. We can choose to feed our minds better, hold the tech giants accountable, and refuse to let the internet rot the next American mind.
