How AI and social media contribute to ‘brain rot’

Last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment: Share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. To come up with tips, some were allowed to use a traditional Google search, while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with Google’s artificial intelligence.

The people using AI-generated summaries wrote advice that was generic, obvious and largely unhelpful — eat healthy foods, stay hydrated and…