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A new preprint study has sounded an alarm every patriotic parent and thinking citizen should hear: artificial intelligences can suffer the same kind of “brain rot” that plagues people who live on short, viral social media content. Researchers from Texas A&M, the University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University ran controlled experiments that deliberately fed large language models months of high-engagement, short-form posts and watched core capabilities degrade.
The numbers are stark and disturbing: reasoning performance dropped roughly in the low-twenties percentage range, long-context memory plunged by about thirty percent, and even personality-proxy tests showed models growing more narcissistic and antisocial after the junk exposure. Those were not hand-wavy anecdotes — the experiments used open models like LLaMA3 and Qwen and measured concrete benchmark declines that any reasonable technologist would recognize as meaningful.
Worse, the paper reports that attempts to “detox” the damaged models by re-training on higher-quality data didn’t fully reverse the decline, suggesting a kind of lasting representational drift. That raises a terrifying possibility for a society increasingly offloading judgment and memory to machine assistants: when the digital tools we depend on are hollowed out by junk, fixing them is not as simple as hitting reset. The work is a preprint and still needs peer review, but journalists and experts are already treating the findings as a serious warning.
Conservatives should be the first to call out the obvious culprit: an attention-maximizing tech business model that rewards the lowest common denominator and funnels trash into the training pipelines of our nation’s tools. This is the predictable result of a culture that prizes clicks over character and dopamine spikes over deliberation. We have seen the human cost for years; now the machines mirror the decline — and that should frighten every American who values reason, faith, and freedom.
There is a practical policy case here that should unite limited-government conservatives and anyone who cares about competence in public life: require greater transparency around the data used to train deployed AI, mandate auditing for cognitive and ethical degradation, and push platforms to prioritize quality signals over raw engagement. Human oversight, curated datasets, and stronger accountability — not technocratic secrecy — are commonsense fixes that protect consumers and preserve institutions.
At a cultural level, this study is another reason to quit pretending that endless scrolling is harmless entertainment. Parents, pastors, teachers, and neighbors must redouble the effort to nourish young minds with books, conversation, civic literacy, and real work. If we let a generation be raised on bite-sized outrage and hollow applause, we will lose more than attention spans; we will lose the civic habits that keep a free country functioning.
The question now is who will act: will we let Big Tech and its algorithms continue to shape thought by default, or will Americans take responsibility for the media diet of their families and demand standards from the companies that shape public discourse? This study hands conservatives a powerful argument — not for censorship, but for stewardship: better data, stronger guards, and a renewed cultural commitment to depth over noise. The future of a thinking America depends on it.
