{"id":219106,"date":"2025-10-23T00:51:59","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T00:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/219106\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T00:51:59","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T00:51:59","slug":"sam-altman-was-right-the-dead-internet-theory-could-kill-the-web-within-3-years-llms-can-suffer-from-brain-rot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/219106\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman was right, the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ could kill the web within 3 years \u2014 “LLMs can suffer from brain rot!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Generative AI<\/a> has evolved, scaling greater heights across a wide range of fields in computing, education, medicine, and more. The technology has come a long way from the early days, where it was synonymous with hallucinations and generating outright incorrect responses to queries.<\/p>\n

As you may know, top AI<\/a> labs like Anthropic, OpenAI<\/a>, Google, and more are heavily dependent on content uploaded and otherwise shared by humans on the internet to train their LLMs (large language models). Last year, a report suggested that these companies had hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality content for training<\/a>, preventing them from developing advanced AI models.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And as it now seems, the same issues continue to haunt advances and development in the AI landscape. According to a new study by Cornell University, LLMs can get “brain rot”<\/a> due to prolonged exposure to low-quality online data. It further elaborated that this heavily contributes to a decline in their cognitive capabilities.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

For context, this kind of internet “brain rot” refers to prolonged exposure and consumption of low-quality and trivial online content. Studies show that this negatively impacts human cognitive capabilities, reasoning, and focus. The same can also be said about AI-powered models.<\/p>\n

The researchers used two measures to assess and identify internet junk content. The first test was centered on engagement with short and viral posts, with a lot of engagement, while the latter focused on semantic quality with a bias on posts considered as low-quality and rife with a clickbait writing style.<\/p>\n

Consequently, the researchers used the measures to construct datasets containing varying proportions of junk and high-quality content. They used the datasets to determine the impact of low-quality content on LLMs like Llama 3 and Qwen 2.5.<\/p>\n

The goal behind the study was to determine the impact on AI systems when they continuously depend on low-quality content uploaded to the web, which is seemingly flooded with short, viral, or machine-generated content.<\/p>\n

All the latest news, reviews, and guides for Windows and Xbox diehards.<\/p>\n

Perhaps of more concern, the study revealed that the accuracy of AI models purely using junk content fell from 74.9% to 57.2%. Their long-context comprehension capabilities were also negatively impacted, dropping from 84.4% to 52.3%. The researchers further revealed that the AI models’ cognitive and comprehension capabilities would only worsen with prolonged exposure to low-quality content for training, a phenomenon they referred to as a dose-response effect.<\/p>\n

The study also revealed that prolonged exposure to low-quality content negatively impacted the models’ ethical consistency, prompting a “personality drift”. As a result, the models were even more prone to generating incorrect responses to queries, making them less reliable.<\/p>\n

Exposure to junk data also impacted the models’ thought process, often skipping the step-by-step chain of thought. This prompted the models to rush through the process only to generate superficial responses.<\/p>\n

The Dead Internet Theory is turning into a reality<\/p>\n

\n

\"Sam
\n<\/p>\n

Sam Altman and Reddit’s co-founder claim much of the internet today is already dead due to the rise of bots and AI. (Image credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)<\/p>\n

Over the past few months, top figures in the tech industry, including Reddit<\/a> co-founder Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a>, have sparked interesting conversations about the “dead internet theory” becoming a reality in the agentic AI era.<\/p>\n

Ohanian recently claimed that much of the internet today is dead<\/a> because of the rise of bots and quasi-AI. However, he predicted the emergence of a next generation of social media that’s verifiably human.<\/p>\n

You all prove the point that so much of the internet is now just dead\u2014this whole dead internet theory, right? Whether it\u2019s botted, whether it\u2019s quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop. Having proof of life, like live viewers and live content, is really f\u2013king valuable to hold attention.<\/p>\n

Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian<\/p>\n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly shares similar sentiments, suggesting that the dead internet theory is manifesting right before our eyes. He further claimed that most X accounts are being managed by LLMs.<\/p>\n

Last year, a study by Amazon Web Services (AWS) researchers suggested that 57% of content published online is AI-generated<\/a> or translated using an AI algorithm, negatively impacting the quality of search results.<\/p>\n

Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey warned that it’ll be impossible to tell what’s real from the fake<\/a> “because of the way images are created, deep fakes, and videos.” He warned that users will need to be more vigilant and experience things by themselves to assert its authenticity.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

\"Click\n<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Follow Windows Central on Google News<\/a> to keep our latest news, insights, and features at the top of your feeds!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Generative AI has evolved, scaling greater heights across a wide range of fields in computing, education, medicine, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-219106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}