Transcription
The average person spends two hours and 21 minutes a day on social media. That's the average person. Two hours and 21 minutes a day on social media. Approximately 141 minutes every single day scrolling. The average American. Our onscreen time.
Overall, the average American spends 6 hours and 38 minutes every day on screens connected to the internet. Oh my gosh. Wow. Time just gone. Just vanished into into what? Updates, scrolls. What is it that we're reading? Seriously, are we we exercising our soul with deep thought?
Do you know that leisure reading in the US has fallen? Only 16% of Americans aged 15 plus read for their own enjoyment on an average day. 15. That number was almost 30% in 2003. Fewer books. US adults in 2021 said they read on average 12.6 six books a year, down from 15 in 2002 to 2016. So, we're losing reading skills. We're losing deeper thought. Um, we're losing hours of conversation. We're losing how many hours of reflection? At least minutes, maybe a hundred minutes.
Our attention spans. How long can you focus on something? You know, the second screen was different. When we first started Blaze, I talked about doing second screen technology and it wasn't because you couldn't watch something. They're now talking about taking your TV show or your your Netflix show and dumbing it down so much because people are watching or they're scrolling while they're watching the TV and so they can't follow a complex storyline. Oh my gosh, we are just going to be just stupid slugs. Everything that we're doing online is fracture fracturing um attention, memory, and sustained reasoning. So, at what point does this become an epidemic? At what point are our minds starving for any kind of nutrition as we just feed them calories of noise?
Now, let me tell you the real story. AI is holding a mirror up for us. There's a new study that came out. LLMs can get brain rot. Okay, that caught my eye. Large language models, LLMs, they are trained on junk web contact uh content. So viral, shallow, high engagement stuff. And all it does is it's just cataloging all this stuff and just consuming all of this stuff that we're scrolling through every day. Okay? Do you know what's happening to the LLM? It's experiencing cognitive decline. It can't. Its reasoning ability is dropping, falling through the floor. Long context memory gone. and dark personality traits, psychopathic tendencies, and narcissism has increased. This is with an AI. Okay? And when the junk content ratio rose from 0 to 100%, if you're just scrolling for junk, the reasoning benchmark falls from 75% to almost 55%. its ability to understand long, you know, long uh form con context falls from 85% to about 50%.
Now, here's the scariest part. They caught this and they're like, "Holy cow, look at what's happening to the large language model. It's completely decaying." You know, we've just been doing this for a year now and look at what's happened. It's not reasoning anymore. It's turning dark. it it can't understand long form content anymore. Let's get it off that. Let's start putting good clean stuff into it. Even after retraining on clean, high quality data, the models never recover the baseline capacity. Okay. The rot remains. As a man or now, as a machine thinkketh, so he becomes. I I've been blown away by this study for the last few weeks. It came out a couple of weeks ago and I've had it on my desk and I've wanted to tell you about it and just haven't had time and it's just it's just it just keeps I just keep think this is a machine. This is this is not our brain. This is this is a machine that is is using the same kind of crap. I mean, what happens if you don't monitor what you think? Or worse yet, when we stop thinking, AI is teaching us a lesson. And I guarantee this. This study's been out for weeks. Never heard it, did you? Nobody's talking about it. is screaming at us, hey, learn a lesson. When you feed nothing but low nutrient, attention hooking, high engagement junk, the capacity to reason, to remember, and to care degrades. Aren't we seeing this now? Do people care as much as they used to? Nope. Can they reason? Nope. Can they remember what happened yesterday? Nope. My gosh. Don't worry about AI taking over, controlling us, programming our lives. Look at ourselves. We've already over we've already signed over our lives to an algorithm. We're studying AI brain rot. But is anybody studying, you know, brain brain rot? Maybe maybe we do recognize it. Maybe we we do recognize it. We're but you know we're too apathetic to wean ourselves off the digital heroin. It's hard. It is hard. But when the nature of what we ingest for body and mind becomes shallow, the body suffers but the mind sinks deeper. And we live in an age where we might be less full of nourishment but full of distraction. We talk less. We actually listen less. We read fewer books, you know, where our minds just flit instead of dive. Our attention span is almost gone. And make no mistake, this is not just a matter of convenience or lifestyle. This is creeping into the structure of who we are individually and collectively. What is this going to do to to our children? I mean, even if we stopped right now and we wanted to change, um, we according to the brain rot study, we won't get that baseline back. Do we pass this stuff on? Is it get to a point to where we're just pumping out morons? I mean, we're already doing that, but I mean, you know, I mean, really pumping out morons. At what point is this an epidemic where anybody even recognizes it? When when is it where our ability to think critically is so diminished we cannot be a free people? Are we there yet?
I told you earlier I went to the bookstore yesterday. My son and I went to the bookstore and I was like we're getting books. I haven't read I've been reading online. It's not the same. It's just not the same. You got you can't remember because you remember sometimes with your fingers. you remember where it is in the book. You know, I can never find anything digitally. I can never find where it is in the book. I I'm looking for it. I can't find it. But I know right where those facts are if I'm reading a physical copy of a book. And you know, deep reading, quiet reflection, sustained dialogue, pretty rare, pretty rare. our mental health, our social health, uh, you know, kind of going down. You know, civic health eroded a little bit. I think we all agree with that. Even when artificial intelligence is trained on junk content, degrade in reason, and we still feed ourselves the same thing. Do are we going to keep doing that? Are we going to choose to do something different? Well, the first thing is we got to get people to understand it. We got to get people Can we get people to even under Can we really Can we get people to actually listen to this and then get engage again in thoughtful reading and conversation and and meaningful silence. It starts with awareness and then choice. What do you permit what what are you going to put into your body? What do you permit into your mind? Otherwise, one day we're all going to look around and we're going to realize we didn't just lose time. We lost the capacity to deeply think and deeply connect, deeply live. Or then again, maybe we're just so stupid and shallow that we we won't know. We're like, I'm happy. Are you happy? I can't. What was the question? I was What are you What are you saying? Maybe that's I mean, maybe that's maybe that's a better life. I love my family. I don't know who my family is, but I love them. Politics. I don't vote. I haven't voted for a long time. Look what's on YouTube. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Okay. It's up to us, America.