I don’t really like zombie movies. But that doesn’t stop me sometimes using zombies in my posts. Last year I wrote about computer zombies (true story). And I managed to fit zombies into a post in 2021.
And now zombies are on my mind again. Maybe because, as the year comes to an end, I feel a bit like the living dead.
A short introduction to zombies
The original zombie was created by magic, and controlled by its animator. It had no autonomy, and did not eat flesh.
Zombies evolved in pop culture into dead, mindless, decaying monsters. They eat living flesh (“br-aaaiii-ns!”) and infect their victims, who also become zombies.
Zombies and the Scrollpocalypse
I’ve written about doom-scrolling and fluff-scrolling before. Social media wants you to scroll forever. It feeds us the next post and the next video, until we look up to discover we’ve lost a few hours.
This scroll addiction has negative emotional and psychological consequences. And research shows that it might turn our brains to mush.
I used the term “mush”. The accepted term is “brain rot”, if that makes you feel better. In fact, “brain rot” was named Oxford Word of the Year for 2024. That’s a bit scary
Research shows that scroll addiction can lead to structural changes in the brain. It affects the areas that deal with attention and impulse control. In simple terms, it is shrinking our grey matter. That’s very scary!
Scrolling is the new monster bite that turns us into zombies:
- Like zombies, we don’t choose what we do. The algorithm chooses what we see next.
- Like zombies, we don’t stop. We keep scrolling even when we are tired or bored or disturbed by the content.
- Like zombies, we spread the infection. We share a silly post, and others get sucked into our doom scrolling.
The new zombies
A study published by Cornell University tested the “LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis”. It confirmed that AIs also get brain rot.
When AI is trained on junk text – the same clickbait and viral nonsense we see – it starts to show the same decay. It skips reasoning steps and becomes unable to process longer text. This leads to shallow or incorrect answers. AI companion bots become erratic and develop undesirable personalities. They give the kind of advice you’d expect from a beauty influencer.
It’s a great story line for a new kind of horror movie. Imagine: the undead feeding on the undead. We get brain rot. We train AI. AI also gets brain rot. We use AI. We get more brain rot. Repeat until everyone’s groaning and drooling on their phones.
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