Events

Event Description

In "Rot,Rinse,Repeat," Alexandra Frye breaks down the defining elements of "brain rot" and helps us better understand why the phenomenon is so widespread in the algorithm-driven logics of social media platforms and explores the impacts it has on both human consciousness and artificial intelligence models. Frye is the editor of the Tech & Ethics series for the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and works as a consultant on and advocate for responsibility in AI. We will be using her essay as both a prompt and a helpful collection of definitions and examples to structure our discussion.

How do we conceptualize the phenomenon of "brain rot"? What are the mechanisms that create feedback loops of this phenomenon? How do we interrupt these loops for ourselves and are there broader educational interventions we can imagine? What are we to make of the insight that even Large Language Models are susceptible to brain rot and seem to degrade in "intellectual" capabilities when it is introduced into their own feedback loops? What does this imply for artificial intelligence moving forward? Or is this merely a new form of literacy we simply can't comprehend yet and are instead privileging the more deliberative and reflective forms of media consumption to which we have grown accustomed?