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Glenn Beck sounded a sharp alarm this week about what he calls an “AI epidemic” that is literally frying people’s brains, and Americans would do well to listen. He warned that large language models, trained on the same viral, low-quality junk we endlessly scroll through, are experiencing a kind of rapid cognitive collapse — and that this degradation can mirror what those machines feed into our own minds. Beck’s message is blunt: if we continue to feed ourselves garbage, we will not just become less informed — we will become less capable of thinking at all.
This isn’t just technophobia; it’s common-sense conservatism. Our culture has suffered decades of intellectual erosion from cable shouting matches, hollow pop culture, and social media engineered for outrage and addiction. Now those attention-warping forces are being amplified by AI systems trained on the very same noise, creating feedback loops that reward emotional drama over careful thought and speed over substance.
The video throws down a more chilling claim — that even attempts to “detox” these AIs with higher-quality data don’t fully reverse the damage. Whether that specific technical conclusion is settled or not, the pattern should be familiar to anyone who has watched a neighbor, a child, or a spouse trade books and church for a river of short clips and cheap dopamine. Technology companies have created machines that mirror our worst online habits, and their platforms profit when we stay shallow, distracted, and enraged.
Make no mistake: this is a cultural and moral question as much as a technical one. The forces shaping our attention are not neutral; they are designed by people and corporations with incentives that rarely align with the flourishing of family, faith, and civic virtue. Conservatives must stop treating tech as an unstoppable tide and start treating it like the public square it has become — a place that requires rules, stewardship, and virtue to keep it from wrecking the soul of the nation.
What should we do? First, push for accountability and transparency from the companies building these models. Americans deserve to know what data trains these systems, how the algorithms rank content, and whether those incentives are degrading our collective ability to reason. Second, we should rebuild cultural institutions that feed the mind: strong families, civic education, places of worship, and schools that teach children to read deeply and think historically, not merely to scroll.
At the same time, personal responsibility matters. Turn off the autoplay. Instill reading habits. Prioritize hours with your children that don’t involve screens. Conservative commonsense has always held that liberty and responsibility travel together — if we want liberty to survive, we must be willing to discipline ourselves and our families against the fast-food mental diet promoted by Big Tech and bad actors online.
Finally, conservatives should make this a policy and political issue, not merely a sermon. Demand parental controls, transparent labeling for AI-generated content, and funding for research into how digital ecosystems shape attention and thought. The left often treats technology as inevitable; conservatives must treat it as a domain of human flourishing that can be governed to preserve freedom and character.
I searched for broad, independent confirmation of the more dramatic technical claims and found that public reporting on an irreversible “cognitive collapse” caused by low-quality training data is limited and contested. That doesn’t invalidate the warning — it highlights the urgency of independent study and public debate so Americans can separate marketing from menace and make wise choices for our children and our country.
