Brainrot is taking over. The term describes the supposed widespread dumbing down of young people, caused by a generation spending every waking moment of their lives staring at screens that blast them with a firehouse of nonsense. The word also describes both the nigh-incomprehensible slang that has resulted ("skibidi," "huzz," "sigma," etc.), and a hypnotic genre of videos in which relaxing, repetitive footage (usually of someone playing Minecraft) is combined with unrelated, AI-generated voiceovers—the kind of thing kids will watch all day as soon as they're old enough to hold a tablet.
If all of this sounds like a bleak, dystopian nightmare...well, it probably is, but a recent wave of AI-powered "PDF to Brainrot" utilities is promising to harness the power of brainrot for good—specifically, to help kids learn and retain information.
Online study aids like Studyrot, Coconote, PDF to brainrot, Memenome, and others will take a PDF file of whatever you like and transform it into a brainrot video/study tool. I haven't been able to uncover any research on whether brainrot is an effective way to study, but it certainly seems to be a way to study, and it can't be much worse than what we're already letting our kids do with the internet, so I put it to the test.
The process of creating a brainrot study aid is easy: Visit any one of the sites above, log in, upload a PDF with the information you want to study, choose the background video from the available lists, and off you go.
If you want study videos that are longer than around a minute you'll have to sign up for a paid subscription—nobody learns for free.
To test these PDF-brainrot schemes out, I fed chapter 7 of Karl Marx's Capital through the four PDF-to-brainrot tools above. Here is what resulted:
Studyrot changed the title from Marx's "The Labour Process and the Valorization Process" to "All about the Sigma Grindset and Gettin' that Bag." A promising start, but sadly, the site only gives away a 5-second sample for free, so I have no idea how well it would do with the rest of the text. Grade: D-
PDF to brainrot lets users choose music as well as a video, but it seems to just shoehorn brainrot terms into its summary, which made it harder to understand, at least to me. Although it gets extra credit for the sentence, "The capitalist plays the role of the toilet," even if that's not exactly what Marx was saying. Sadly, I cannot embed the video I made, but you can you can watch it here.
Grade: C
Memenome is a headscratcher. It changed Marx's title to "The Capitalist: From Employment to Enchantment in the Labor Wonderland" and made up a story about a worker inventing "guilt-free cheese." Amusing, but it did not help me understand how production relates to labor to create value.
Grade: C-
Coconote created a straightforward, simplified summary of Marx over some classic Vines. It's the most useful of the lot, but it lacks a certain je ne sais skibidi. Check it out:
Grade: B
As I noted, there's no solid research on how effective brainrot might be at encouraging learning or comprehension, but I'm guessing it doesn't work very well. Granted, there have been a lot of studies on the difference between listening and reading a text, and while there's no clear winner, there may be some benefit to some students of hearing a text read aloud. And maybe there's some benefit to improving concentration via watching repetitive imagery while accompanying text is being read aloud. But we don't know for sure.
At first glance, this concept seems similar to the Schoolhouse Rock videos of the '70s and '80s, which used music to make complex concepts easier to understand. I know from firsthand experience that a catchy tune can help you remember the text of the preamble to the Constitution and grasp the basics of how it was drafted. But Schoolhouse Rock was produced by professionals who hired educational consultants to oversee the series' output, and not an AI. No one is overseeing these PDF to brainrot companies; we don't value that kind of pedagogy anymore.
I was surprised by how each PDF to brainrot company took a different approach to the same material—they all feel so gimmicky and scammy on the surface, I figured they'd use the same cheap program, but they varied quite a lot. Still, of all the variations, only Coconote produced something that could conceivably, maybe be useful when studying.
I can see the how some students might better understand things through story-telling and metaphor, or by hearing it translated into more familiar language, but the execution is so bad that it seems like any advantage would be drowned out—the AI powering these study aids is just not very good at its job. The concepts in Marx, and in any other text, don't usually align with the meaning of the 20 or so current slang words the AI has been ordered to include (is Marx's surplus-value theory sigma or alpha?), and AI study aids are as prone to the hallucinations as any AI, so anything you learn from it needs to be fact-checked anyway.
In summary: just read books. Leave the brainrot on TikTok.
If you're having trouble concentrating on this post because there are so many words in it and you'd prefer a summary of it read by a computer over footage from a video game, I fed this article through PDF to brainrot to see what would come out. Enjoy.
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(Note that I did not say brainrot study aids are "dank.")
