TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH: THE IMPLICATIONS OF BRAIN ROT
We spoke with digital strategists, entrepreneurs and content editors to understand the addictive nature of “brain rot."
The term “brain rot” has achieved memeable status at this point, taking on several different meanings, with all encompassing a general vibe.
Yet, when asked the definition of “brain rot” to several different people, no one definition emerges.
Themes of overstimulation were commonplace throughout each definition, but each person applied brain rot to advancing their own separate causes. Whether it was political, educational, or for entertainment purposes, each saw brain rot as a way of managing the attention of others. When the Oxford Dictionary deemed “brain rot” as the word of 2024, it added a polished luster to a new wave of media consumption.
The dictionary defined “brain rot” as “the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging, especially on social media.”
The definition was an acknowledgement of years of social media and online consumption, that upended traditional media and the ways humans engage with digital platforms.
Brain Rot as an Aesthetic: Language
One approach of looking at brain rot is as a semiotic system. Avana Wang, a senior studying Cinema and Media Studies at USC described brain rot as something that had a hypnotic effect. “Brain rot is usually really rapid edits, really random or obscure themes… It just tickles your brain in an anxiety-inducing way for me, because everything's very rapid and obscure,” said Wang.
Understanding brain rot is similar to a dialect of a language in that people need to understand the inside jokes that comprise it. Terms such as “skibidi toilet,” “sussy,” and “rizz” have now infiltrated the speaking patterns of youth, sparked by trends on social media. The impact of Brain Rot vocabulary transcends typical memeagry, requiring a high level of cultural fluency.
Seeing the disconnect between adults and younger children who consumed online short-form content, one USC student saw an opportunity for a business idea. Joshua Brennan, a student studying at USC’s Iovine and Young Academy saw an opportunity to create a translator for “brain rot” terminology, intended for adults to understand their Gen Alpha children.
Inspired by his co-founder, Chance, who was on a family vacation in Mexico and saw younger cousins “talking in brain rot,” in turn confusing the parents, the students realized they were sitting on a golden pot. In correspondence between the two, they asked the simple question: “What if we made Duolingo for parents to understand brain rot?” And harnessing ChatGPT’s wrapper feature, Brennan was able to develop the app alongside a team, learning to code along the way.
"People consume content differently now. You can’t just make an ad or post something normal—you have to integrate into the culture, speak the same language, and move at the same speed as the trends,” Brennan said.
Rachel Kisela and Brain Rot Content Editing
YouTube and online platforms that have democratized media creation laid the foundation for the brain rot that we see today. One of the most iconic YouTubers, Mr. Beast changed content creation forever with his viral editing style. Jimmy Donaldson’s fast paced editing style, which struck cultural nerves, still rings today in short-form content. TikTok is a fundamental driver of brain rot, with it reinventing the ways that editors thought about their content. Rachel Kisela, a former lead editor at
Mr. Beast’s team made the transition into short-form video, working as a freelance editor for channels on TikTok and other short-form platforms. She spoke on her experience as an editor, both with Mr. Beast, and as an independent producer.
“Your editing is very much shaped by how the platform is built,” Kisela said, reflecting on her newfound career in short form, “You're trying to hook someone's attention visually and with audio as fast as humanly possible.” Rather than being a game of overall views, TikTok and short-form platforms track the ways that viewers engage with content in terms of retention.
“If the performance of the video is based on loops, and you can trick someone into looping it, the video is going to do better.” Kisela mentioned several of the differences between editing for short form and long form: “It’s a balance between your left brain: the data side, and the right brain: the creative side…
that’s one thing I really like about social media editing,” Kisela said, when speaking on the differences between the processes. “If a normal story is 1-2-3-4, you would do 2-3-4-1,” said Kisela, discussing story structure of short form content.
Brain Rot in the Classroom, an Educational Tool
Entrepreneur Jackie Ni takes the same approach as Brennan and Kisela, knowing the ins and outs of engaging audiences with short form content. But for him, he found that brain rot can be a tool for educational content due to its addictive and engaging nature. A 23 year old Columbia Computer Science graduate, Ni has always seen how memes can engage audiences. These experiences pushed him to create a powerful tool for engagement within the classroom.
Ni is the co-head of Memenome, a company that develops AI-powered content generation tools such as the popular “PDF-to-Brain Rot tools” that are intended to help students study for tests and absorb information. “Trying to fight brain rot with brain rot,” is the mission of co-founder and CEO of Memenome, Jackie Ni. Ni doesn’t see brain rot as a degradation of attention, but instead as a logical shift in how younger generations consume information.
The idea of PDF to Brain Rot was inspired by Ni’s experience as a tutor at the Sage Hill School. While teaching programming, Ni realized that by utilizing humor– encouraging students to create spam bots that attacked his email, program RC drones and flying them at him from across the classroom and hand coding meme pages– he could boost retention in his classes.
“For me, it just showed that there is a new way to teach. If I’m already working on memes, trends, etc., it makes sense to adapt that toward education. We’re allowing kids to learn better by engaging with them in the way they already consume content.
The following video is AI-generated by Memenome, based on the previous paragraphs.
Now, with monthly revenues from PDF2Brainrot, solely, exceeding $12,000, according to Ni, enough to sustain his lifestyle as an independent graduate living in Southern California. “Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t just want traditional content; they want things that engage them in a way that feels native to them,” Ni said of his company’s tools.
Memes in Real Time: AI Generated Brain Rot
The advancement of AI has made the process of creating memes more accessible than ever before through tools such as the PDF2Brainrot. If memes are built on references, new advancements in AI technology allow users to make realtime references through the usage of existing people’s image and likeness.
Ni’s newest product, 3Blue1Bron, does just this. By utilizing lip-syncing technology and LLMs to summarize text files in the format of a conversational Lebron James press interview. The model is trained
on hundreds of hours of the basketball star fed to an AI model by developers at Memenome.
“For lip-syncing, we’re using an open-source model where you provide a video or an image and a 'driving audio'—that's what they call it. The AI then syncs the mouth movements to the audio, making it look like the person is talking.” The following video is a lecture on Marketing Planning generated by a user-inputted PDF.
"What’s crazy is how fast this is developing. A year ago, this kind of real-time animation didn’t really exist at this quality. Now it’s feasible, and I can see us making this even better over time,” said Ni. The developer was visibly excited by the implications for this development when it came to scaling his business.
When asked about whether or not his educational approaches have been proven to work, Ni responded with a simple framework of his philosophy. “If you just throw text and slides at [Gen Alpha students], they tune out. But if you mix learning with something engaging—something entertaining—then you’re speaking their language.”
Besides within education, the implications of this form of content have caused a sense of anxiety within creative and political spaces. Jordon Sun, a junior studying Business Administration with a minor in Visual Narrative Art advocated for creatives to be part of the process, stating
that “if you rely on AI too much, it might take away from creativity and the role of creators in making video content.” He fanned caution at the idea of AI-generated content, saying that “we need to be careful about how we utilize it in the future.”
And with meme based communication playing heavily into recent U.S. elections, political strategists are concerned. Short form content has transformed political messaging, and the Trump team has leaned heavily into AI-generated aesthetics. Cameron Trimble, the former White House Digital Engagement Director during the Biden administration cited COVID as a driver of these digital patterns.
As White House Digital Engagement Director for the Biden Administration during COVID, Trimble saw how audiences engaged with social platforms, helping to adapt the Biden campaign to a digital setting. But nothing could have prepared him for the challenges that are faced today.
“During my first two years at the White House, we weren’t dealing with AI-generated voices or deep fakes like we are today. Now, you can create an entire fake video of a politician saying something inflammatory, and by the time fact-checkers catch it, it’s already spread through thousands of group chats and Facebook feeds.”
“People have been trained to be entertained through all levels of content. So even if I'm reading a news article in The New York Times now, that headline needs to be written in an entertaining and engaging way just for me to even click on it.”
Meme culture, including brain rot, has reshaped political communication, creating dangerous implications, according to Trimble. “The technology and culture—how people actually use it—is moving faster than laws and regulators can keep up,” said Trimble.
AI Disclosure: This website was built entirely through ChatGPT prompting and troubleshooting in an HTML editor. The article and reporting were completely human and not AI-generated. AI generated pieces of content were featured when disclosed and only mentioned to advance the story in the context of AI-generated videos.