They also tried to heal the damage, to partial avail. Besides, it's science: you need to test your hypotheses empirically. Also, to draw attention to the issue among researchers, performing a study and sharing your results is possibly the best way.
Yeah I mean I get that, but surely we have research like this already. "Garbage in, garbage out" is basically the catchphrase of the entire ml field. I guess the contribution here is that "brainrot"-like text is garbage which, even though it seems obvious, does warrant scientific investigation. But then that's what the paper should focus on. Not that "LLMs can get 'brain rot'".
I guess I don't actually have an issue with this research paper existing, but I do have an issue with its clickbait-y title that gets it a bunch of attention, even though the actual research is really not that interesting.
The idea of brain rot is that if you take a good brain and give it bad data it becomes bad. Obviously if you give a baby (blank brain) bad data it will become bad. This is about the rot, though.