LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"!
Shuo Xing, Junyuan Hong, Yifan Wang, Runjin Chen, Zhenyu Zhang, Ananth Grama, Zhengzhong Tu, Zhangyang Wang • October 13, 2025
We investigate the "LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis"—that continual exposure to low-quality web text can induce cognitive decline in LLMs. Through controlled experiments on Twitter/X corpora, we demonstrate significant declines in reasoning, long-context understanding, and safety, while inflating negative traits.