The FAIK Files A.I. Made The News Again
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Nov 14, 2025 Explore whether AI models can suffer from 'brain rot' and how junk data impacts their reasoning. Discover shocking instances of AI-generated videos fooling news outlets like Fox. Delve into the rise of AI in journalism, as an Australian radio group embraces automation despite concerns over quality. Plus, hear about quirky real-world applications of AI, from robot dogs to a woman marrying a chatbot persona, sparking discussions on loneliness and spirituality.
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Low-Quality Social Data Warps LLMs
- Training LLMs on short, highly engaging social-media content degrades reasoning and increases toxic personality traits like narcissism and psychopathy.
- The study shows thought-skipping and chain-of-thought failures happen as junk-data ratio rises and are hard to fix by later tuning.
Junk Defined: Popularity, Brevity, Low Quality
- The researchers defined 'junk' by popularity, brevity, and low semantic quality, then demonstrated plausible-sounding but incorrect reasoning emerges from such training data.
- Examples include confident, wrong multi-step answers that read convincingly yet hallucinate causal claims.
Tay And Norman Foreshadowed Brain Rot
- Perry recalls MIT's Norman and Microsoft's Tay as earlier demonstrations that feeding biased internet data produces antisocial or toxic models.
- These historical examples parallel modern brain-rot findings and warn of repeatable failure modes when scraping the web liberally.
