Scientists Say LLMs Appear to Be Acting as a Cognitive Virus Among Humans

David Bellamy on Twitter / X

I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.— David Bellamy (@DavidRBellamy) September 13, 2026

Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus

Large-language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of human culture, reshaping how information is produced, transmitted, and used. Here we propose that their diffusion can be understood through a viral analogy, with LLM use spreading through populations, becoming embedded in cognitive and cultural practices. We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in. A central consequence is the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence. The same framework, however, identifies conditions for cognitive immunization, based on reducing transmission and facilitating reversibility. Our results highlight how LLM adoption may involve nonlinear collective transitions with important consequences for cognitive autonomy.

How LLMs are and are not like the brain

Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...

Lincoln Michel on Twitter / X

This was my read on AI from the beginning and it proved very true. Whatever hypothetical benefits LLMs have (and they have some), their main use is to waste everyone's time wading through slop. Longer colleague powerpoints. More spam emails. More slop clogging up all the systems. https://t.co/2gtGfqf7KF— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 21, 2026

How Do We Talk about LLMs?

By Jim Clifford It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all deal…

Artificial intelligences and human scientists exhibit...

We investigate the effectiveness of artificial intelligences (AI)-specifically large language models (LLMs)-relative to human scientists at high-level cognitive tasks in social science such as...

Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.

Claude's faulty "known entity" neurons sometimes override its "don't answer" circuitry.

I’m Tired of Talking About AI

I don’t want to talk about LLMs anymore.

How I use AI

LLMs in everyday life and work

Cognitive exponents and LLM leverage

I know a few people for whom LLMs have been a near-immediate multiplier of attention and effort. I know a lot for whom LLMs clearly make them worse at thinking and doing things. So: why?

A Microsoft researcher sent some goats on a mission in Age of Empires II to make a point about LLMs | IBM

A Microsoft researcher built a working neural network out of Age of Empires II goats to show that human-like AI traits are a property of the chat window, not the technology beneath it.

Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network

Anthropic's conceptual mapping helps explain why LLMs behave the way they do.

Artificial

An LLM is a computer program. We should talk about it like a computer program.

Artificial

An LLM is a computer program. We should talk about it like a computer program.