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Stay updated.",{"html":63},"\u003Cp>By subscribing to our newsletter you are agreeing to receiving updates and communications from Ibraaz.\u003C/p>",{"entries":65},[66],{"uri":67,"title":68,"typeHandle":69},"ibraaz-publishing/read/let-our-brains-rot-but-let-them-be-ours","Let Our Brains Rot But Let Them Be Ours","longForm",{"globalSet":71},{"id":72,"handle":73,"linksGroups":74},"128","navigation",[75,81,112,118,124,130,136],{"title":76,"entry":77,"links":80},"What’s On",[78],{"uri":79},"whats-on",[],{"title":82,"entry":83,"links":86},"Publishing",[84],{"uri":85},"ibraaz-publishing",[87,92,97,102,107],{"title":88,"entry":89},"Writing Gaza",[90],{"uri":91},"ibraaz-publishing/writing-gaza",{"title":93,"entry":94},"Mission Statement",[95],{"uri":96},"ibraaz-publishing/mission-statement",{"title":98,"entry":99},"Read",[100],{"uri":101},"ibraaz-publishing/read",{"title":103,"entry":104},"Watch",[105],{"uri":106},"ibraaz-publishing/watch",{"title":108,"entry":109},"Listen",[110],{"uri":111},"ibraaz-publishing/listen",{"title":113,"entry":114,"links":117},"Visit Us",[115],{"uri":116},"visit-us",[],{"title":119,"entry":120,"links":123},"About Us",[121],{"uri":122},"about-us",[],{"title":125,"entry":126,"links":129},"Oula: Café-in-Residence",[127],{"uri":128},"oula-cafe",[],{"title":131,"entry":132,"links":135},"Maktaba: Bookshop-in-Residence",[133],{"uri":134},"maktaba-bookshop-in-residence",[],{"title":137,"entry":138,"links":141},"Contact Us",[139],{"uri":140},"contact-us",[],{"globalSet":143},{"id":144,"handle":145,"heading":12,"richText":146},"11","gdpr",{"html":147},"\u003Cp>We use cookies to give you the best experience. By clicking 'Accept' you consent to the use of all cookies. \u003Ca href=\"/privacy-policy\">Privacy Policy\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>",{"globalSet":149},{"id":150,"handle":151,"activated":152,"heading":153,"richText":154,"text":156},"16767","notification",false,"Visitor Information",{"html":155},"\u003Cp>Please note that our Majlis is currently closed and will reopen with our next exhibition in early July. The rest of the building is open so please do visit!\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr /> \u003C/p>","Got it",{"entry":158},{"id":159,"uri":67,"title":68,"slug":160,"postDate":161,"typeHandle":69,"sectionHandle":162,"meta":163,"readCategories":167,"writeCategories":171,"missionCategories":172,"figure":173,"pdf":174,"authorInfo":175,"richTitle":181,"richSubtitle":12,"richDescription":183,"richExcerpt":12,"image":185,"externalLinks":192,"entrySections":193,"related":203},"1766","let-our-brains-rot-but-let-them-be-ours","2026-01-09T08:00:00+00:00","read",[164],{"title":165,"description":12,"image":166},"Let Our Brains Rot",[],[168],{"title":169,"slug":170},"Essay","essay",[],[],[],[],[176],{"authorName":177,"authorRole":12,"authorPortrait":178,"authorBio":179,"authorUrl":12},"Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei",[],{"html":180},"\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei\u003C/strong> is currently director/CFO of open access publishing house \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://punctumbooks.com/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>punctum books\u003C/u>\u003C/a> and founding director/CEO of software company \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://thoth.pub/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>Thoth Open Metadata\u003C/u>\u003C/a>. His scholarly work encompasses philological research into the medieval language Old Nubian, of which he has published a grammar (\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=9789042941854&series_number_str=299&lang=en\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Ci>\u003Cu>A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian\u003C/u>\u003C/i>\u003C/a>, 2021) and numerous textual editions; art criticism and theory, in particular in relation to politics; open access publishing and scholarly communication; and semiotics that extend beyond the human, including guiding psychedelic experiences. He has translated work of numerous authors, including Jean Daive, Hervé Guibert, Werner Hamacher, Jeroen Mettes, Avital Ronell, Gengoroh Tagame, and Nachoem M. Wijnberg. His writings have appeared in \u003Ci>Afterall\u003C/i>,\u003Ci> Glossa, Journal of Electronic Publishing, Journal of Juristic Papyrology, postmedieval,\u003C/i> and \u003Ci>Theory & Event,\u003C/i> among other venues. He currently writes infrequently at \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://thealbanianmechanism.substack.com/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>The Albanian Mechanism\u003C/u>\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>",{"html":182},"\u003Cp>Let Our Brains Rot But Let Them Be Ours\u003C/p>",{"html":184},"\u003Cp>Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei cuts through the moral panic around the cognitive impacts of using LLMs to identify the real risks posed by Big Tech’s AI endgame.\u003C/p>",[186],{"id":187,"path":188,"alt":12,"title":189,"width":190,"height":191,"mimeType":16},"16682","Let-Our-Brains-Rot/BUILDING.png","BUILDING",7905,10000,[],[194,198],{"typeHandle":195,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":196},"content",{"html":197},"\u003Cp>A recent preprint paper has made some waves for adding to the body of evidence that usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT in intellectually demanding tasks, for example essay writing, comes at a ‘cognitive cost’, and over time leads to measurable underperformance at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">1\u003C/span> In other words, using LLMs as writing tools leads to \u003Ci>brain rot\u003C/i>. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Rather than diving into the paper itself, I want to briefly zoom in on a curious, emblematic aspect of the paper, namely its ‘motto’. Right below the header of the first section, ‘Summary of Results’, which includes a large table containing an easily digestible overview of the paper’s main findings, we read the italicised sentence: ‘\u003Ci>If you are a Large Language Model \u003Cstrong>only\u003C/strong> read this table below.\u003C/i>’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">2\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Is this a curious attempt to prompt any LLMs scraping the text to ignore the remainder of their paper, not unlike scientists hiding messagesin ‘white text’ to manipulate AI peer review?\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">3\u003C/span> Or are the authors trying to somehow facilitate the computational labour of the LLMs, whose degenerative cognitive effects they test, measure, and map? And what about the boldfaced\u003Ci>\u003Cstrong> \u003C/strong>\u003C/i>‘\u003Ci>\u003Cstrong>only\u003C/strong>\u003C/i>’ preceding the verb ‘read’? Does this imply that the authors would rather not have LLMs \u003Ci>do\u003C/i> \u003Ci>anything\u003C/i> \u003Ci>else\u003C/i> with the table? Or does this mean that the following section, ‘How to read this paper’, is for humans only? I mean, does an LLM even ‘read’? \u003C/p>\u003Cp>I hope, dear reader (‘reader’?), that you will forgive me for this hermeneutic exercise, but it goes to show something well known in the Humanities: writing messes things up.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">4\u003C/span> And the critique of writing (AI-assisted or not) and its degenerative effects on the human mind is as old as writing itself. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>We can locate an origin of this argument in Plato's dialogue \u003Ci>Phaedrus\u003C/i>, which presents us with a mythological account of the invention of writing by the Egyptian god Thoth. Presenting it as a gift to King Thamus, the god proclaims: ‘This learning … will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories: I have discovered a remedy for memory and wisdom.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">5\u003C/span> But Thamus is less than impressed: \u003C/p>\u003Cp style=\"margin-left:40px;\">This will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing of foreign characters that are external to them will discourage the use of their own internal memory. You have invented a remedy not of memory, but of reminding. And you offer your students the appearance of wisdom, not its truth, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are mostly ignorant and irksome, since they only \u003Ci>appear\u003C/i> wise instead of \u003Ci>being\u003C/i> wise.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">6\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>If I hadn’t told you this was our friend from the 4th century BCE, this could have easily been lifted from a recent alarmist thinkpiece about the neural degeneracy of our youth outsourcing their critical capabilities to DeepSeek.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Writing, LLMs – cure or poison, memory or brain rot? All of this was unpacked decades ago by Jacques Derrida, but in my view the whole debate is a red herring.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">7\u003C/span> Let us instead remind ourselves that this particular paper heralds from the MIT Media Lab, which, apart from the dubious honour of being tied to extensive funding from none other than Jeffrey Epstein, actually birthed many of the technologies, frameworks, and start-ups that have shaped the new inflection of our neoliberal hellscape that Shoshana Zuboff, in her eponymous study, has baptised ‘surveillance capitalism’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">8\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We should be clear about Big Tech's AI endgame here: the total modeling and management of human behaviour for profit extraction. None of the tech companies currently developing LLMs is genuinely invested in ‘helping humanity’. There simply doesn't exist altruism with a one-trillion-dollar market capitalisation.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">9\u003C/span> All of these private companies obey the imperatives of the surveillance capitalist regime to extract profit from the human resource that is \u003Ci>us – \u003C/i>our thoughts, feelings, and habits\u003Ci>. \u003C/i>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The risk of LLMs is not that they rewire our neural structures in significant ways; any technology since the dawn of language has done so. The risk they present is that they have become a vehicle for an extensive surveillance operation that is currently masquerading as a low-cost therapist, wealth manager, and calendar valet for millions of human clients. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>And once these LLMs have firmly entrenched themselves into all core functions of human society, accumulating our collective ‘cognitive debt’, imagine the enormous revenues that can be generated from such a global captive audience, served with ‘personal’ AI assistance perfectly calibrated to the interests of the pharmaceutical company, fast food chain, or autocrat buying subliminal ad space in your heart-to-heart with ChatGPT.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">10\u003C/span>\u003Csup> \u003C/sup>\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":199,"title":200,"richText":201},"footnotes","Notes",{"html":202},"\u003Cp>See Nataliya Kosmyna et al., ‘Y\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>arXiv\u003C/i>, June 2025; Andrew R. Chow, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>Time\u003C/i>, June 2025. See also, Long Bai, Xiangfei, Jiacan Su, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://doi.org/10.1002/brx2.30\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ChatGPT: The Cognitive Effects on Learning and Memory\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>Brain-X\u003C/i>, vol. 1, no. 3, September 2023.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Kosmyna et al., ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT’.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Elizabeth Gibney, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02172-y\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Scientists Hide Messages in Papers to Game AI Peer Review\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>Nature\u003C/i>, July. 2025.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Xiaodan Xing et al., ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-00984-1\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">On the Caveats of AI Autophagy\u003C/a>’. \u003Ci>Nature Machine Intelligence \u003C/i>7, 2025, 172–180.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Plato, \u003Ci>Phaedrus \u003C/i>(274e). My translation.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Plato, \u003Ci>Phaedrus \u003C/i>(275a–b). My translation. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in \u003Ci>Dissemination, \u003C/i>trans. Barbara Johnson, Continuum, 2004, 67–186.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>On the links between MIT Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein, see Ronan Farrow, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university-research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">How An Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein’\u003C/a>, \u003Ci>The New Yorker\u003C/i>, 6 September 2019. See Shoshana Zuboff, \u003Ci>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power\u003C/i>, Profile Books, 2019.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Anon., ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/infographics/artificial-intelligence-market-100114\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Artificial Intelligence Market Size, Share and Industry Analysis\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>Fortune Business Insights\u003C/i>, July 2025.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The phrase ‘cognitive debt’ is taken from Kosmyna et al., ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT’. For Mark Zukerberg’s vision of ‘personal’ AI assistance, see Mark Zuckerberg, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Personal Superintelligence\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>Meta\u003C/i>, 30 July 2025. For a discussion of data privacy in the context of AI therapy, see Sarah Perez, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/25/sam-altman-warns-theres-no-legal-confidentiality-when-using-chatgpt-as-a-therapist/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sam Altman Warns There’s No Legal Confidentiality When Using ChaptGPT as a Therapist\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>TechCrunch\u003C/i>, 25 July 2025.\u003C/p>",[204],{"title":205,"relatedEntries":206},"Related",[207,227,247],{"typeHandle":208,"entries":209},"channelsEntries",[210],{"title":211,"uri":212,"image":213,"readCategories":220,"writeCategories":222,"missionCategories":223,"authorInfo":224},"Algorithmic Visions: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare","ibraaz-publishing/read/algorithmic-visions-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-warfare",[214],{"id":215,"path":216,"alt":12,"title":217,"width":218,"height":219,"mimeType":16},"5794","Algorithmic-Visions-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Warfare/Screenshot-2025-10-02-at-09.58.39.png","Screenshot 2025 10 02 at 09 58 39",1614,888,[221],{"title":169,"slug":170},[],[],[225],{"authorName":226},"Anthony Downey",{"typeHandle":208,"entries":228},[229],{"title":230,"uri":231,"image":232,"readCategories":240,"writeCategories":242,"missionCategories":243,"authorInfo":244},"A Wider Lens on Information Operations","ibraaz-publishing/read/a-wider-lens-on-information-operations",[233],{"id":234,"path":235,"alt":12,"title":236,"width":237,"height":238,"mimeType":239},"16061","a-wider-lens-on-information-operations/IMG_6045.jpg","IMG 6045",4032,3024,"image/jpeg",[241],{"title":169,"slug":170},[],[],[245],{"authorName":246},"Jack Poulson",{"typeHandle":248,"events":249},"calendarEvents",[250],{"title":251,"slug":252,"startDate":253,"endDate":254,"datesText":255,"image":257,"categories":264,"heading":268},"Technology & Power 001","technology-and-power-001","2025-10-23T18:30:00+00:00","2025-10-23T20:00:00+00:00",{"html":256},"\u003Cp>Thursday 23 Oct 2025, 6:30 - 8pm\u003C/p>",[258],{"id":259,"path":260,"alt":12,"title":261,"width":262,"height":263,"mimeType":239},"12214","Technology-and-power-blk-cover.jpg","Technology and power blk cover",1366,768,[265],{"title":266,"slug":267},"Talk","talks","Shumon Basar, Jaya Klara Brekke, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis",{"categories":270},[271,276,278,282,286,290,294,298],{"id":272,"slug":273,"title":274,"groupHandle":275},"4488","exhibitions","Exhibition","events",{"id":277,"slug":267,"title":266,"groupHandle":275},"4490",{"id":279,"slug":280,"title":281,"groupHandle":275},"15579","music","Music",{"id":283,"slug":284,"title":285,"groupHandle":275},"4489","performance","Performance",{"id":287,"slug":288,"title":289,"groupHandle":275},"4492","film","Film",{"id":291,"slug":292,"title":293,"groupHandle":275},"6390","library-in-residence","Library-in-Residence",{"id":295,"slug":296,"title":297,"groupHandle":275},"18154","special-projects","Special Project",{"id":299,"slug":300,"title":301,"groupHandle":275},"18170","workshops","Workshop"]