Glenn Beck is right to sound the alarm: a new body of research shows that the flood of viral, low-quality internet content doesn’t just rot human attention — it can rot the thinking of the machines we build, too. A preprint titled “LLMs Can Get ‘Brain Rot’!” and reporting in outlets summarizing the work lay out controlled experiments where continual exposure to junk web posts measurably degraded model reasoning and judgment.
The researchers ran controlled continual-pretraining tests using real social-media corpora and clear definitions of “junk” versus clean text, and the results were blunt and consistent: reasoning scores fell, long?context comprehension cratered, and models began to skip steps in chains of thought. The team documented a dose–response effect — the more junk in the diet, the worse the decline — and even personality proxies shifted toward overconfidence and riskier outputs.
Worse, the paper found that standard “detox” measures — reflective prompting, instruction tuning, and retraining on higher?quality data — only partially repaired the damage; models never fully returned to baseline. That’s the real horror: this isn’t a temporary glitch you can patch with a better prompt or a PR spin, it’s representational drift that leaves scar tissue in systems we trust.
Anyone paying attention should see the parallel to human life: if we gorge on skinny, viral junk that rewards clicks and outrage, our minds get dull; the machines do the same. The feedback loop is terrifyingly simple — Big Tech’s engagement algorithms amplify shallow content, models train on that content, then those models spit out more slick junk that floods the public square. This isn’t just an academic curiosity; it’s a public?interest problem that accelerates cultural decay.
So what should patriots do? We demand accountability: transparency about training data, independent cognitive?health checks for deployed models, and real curation standards that prioritize depth over virality. Conservatives who care about strong families, free speech, and civic virtue should lead the push for policies that protect our national mind from corporate junk food masquerading as “content.”
Finally, the remedy begins at home and in communities — put down the endless scroll, insist on reading and real conversation, teach children to value substance over sensation. The elites in Silicon Valley sold us speed and convenience as virtue, but speed without truth erodes liberty; if we love freedom we’ll refuse to be anesthetized by the digital diet and insist our institutions feed both people and machines better.
