Brain Rot, Bible Study, and the Bot in Between
TikTokers are building personal curricula to escape the attention economy. I invited ChatGPT to mine.
Editor’s Note: Hi! It’s been a minute! You know the drill: travel, holidays, and the general chaos of trying to close out one year and start another. But I’m back, and I brought an essay.
Somewhere in the past few weeks, the algorithm decided I needed to know about the TikTokers who are creating personal curricula, and I had that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV moment: “Hey, I do that too!” But the more I watched, the more I realized that there’s something separating what I’m seeing from what I do myself. One guess what it is.
Brain Rot, Bible Study, and the Bot in Between
Something weird is happening on YouTube and TikTok. People are learning on purpose.
Not for credit or a degree—just for fun. They’re calling them “personal curricula“: self-designed syllabi organized by units of study, complete with reading lists, weekly schedules, and end-of-semester essays no one will ever grade.
The topics range from astrology to the history of tuberculosis to the philosophy of good and evil in classic literature. The aesthetic leans cozy academia—composition notebooks, candlelight, physical books with handwritten marginalia. It’s Gilmore Girls meets Hermione Granger meets that one friend who actually finished Infinite Jest.
The trend appears to have started with a TikTok creator named Elizabeth Jean, a former sommelier who’d been building study plans for herself long before she started posting about them. Her videos have spawned a whole subculture, all responding to the same diagnosis. “Brain rot“ was Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2024—shorthand for the mental fog that descends after too much trivial content, the creeping suspicion that your attention span is decomposing in real time.
The term isn’t new; Thoreau used it in Walden back in 1854, which is both reassuring and extremely depressing. “It is tiring to get these bursts of 90-second clips in your eyes all the time,” one personal curriculum builder told CNN. “It’s so overstimulating that people want that slowness.”
I want that slowness too. I recognize the craving that drives someone to light a candle, open a composition notebook, and handwrite a syllabus for a semester of self-directed study. The TikTokers and I have made the same diagnosis. We just wrote different prescriptions. My prescription is an AI study buddy.
Analog first, AI second
I’ve been getting a teensy bit into the Bible over the past six months or so. Yes, I have a “personal curriculum” and, yes, AI is along for the ride.
I have a custom ChatGPT project called “BibleGPT”—complete with instructions about how I want it to behave, a syllabus we built together, and a growing list of chats from the past six months. It knows my religious background (raised Lutheran, detoured through evangelical, landed on secular humanist). It knows I’m here for the tradition and the culture, not the salvation. It also knows I have fifteen study Bibles and opinions about translation philosophy.
In fact, I built the curriculum itself—all seven phases and six learning loops of it—in partnership with ChatGPT. It interviewed me about my background, my goals, my intellectual commitments. We constructed the syllabus together.
A snapshot of the front page of my Bible Study syllabus as of December 2025.
My physical setup has migrated from my bedroom to my living room, where a bookshelf my great-uncle Fred built now holds (part of) my expanding theological collection. I ferry from the couch to the shelf and back again toting various volumes, and it’s not uncommon for there to be more Bibles visible than couch. Exhibit A:
Reading Psalm 139:13-16 in six different translations and comparing them because ChatGPT told me to.
When I’m in disciplined mode, the practice is almost aggressively physical. I sit down with my ESV Veritas and my NRSVue journaling Bible, do a clean read-through of the chapter in the ESV, then a second pass to mark it up in the NRSVue—underlining, bracketing, circling, scribbling questions in the margins. I have a color-coding system I’m unreasonably proud of: yellow for theology, green for people and places, brown for historical context, red for linguistic notes, pink for literary observations. Then I dig through my study Bibles and commentaries. Chapter by chapter.
ChatGPT doesn’t enter until the end, if at all—when I’ve noticed something I want to explore further, some question the commentaries didn’t answer, some half-formed thought I want to talk through. It’s more Socratic partner than oracle. I come to it with something I’ve already seen; it helps me understand why.
Sometimes, though, I let ChatGPT take the lead. I’ll show up in a more playful mood and say, “Give me an activity that uses my translations,” or “What’s something interesting I could do with the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible?” The other night, I asked for a translation activity, and ChatGPT suggested: read Psalm 62, verses one and two, in every translation you own. Note the differences.
I ask ChatGPT to give me an assignment and it obliges with a translation study on Psalm 62:1-2
What I noticed was that half my translations used “fortress” and half used something else—refuge, haven, stronghold. Same Hebrew word, apparently, but translators kept reaching for different English. So I asked ChatGPT to explain. It walked me through the Hebrew, the semantic range, the theological freight each English word carries. I didn’t learn that there was a difference—I’d already seen it. I learned why.
My ChatGPT study buddy goes full word study on the Hebrew underlying the word my translations variously render as “fortress,” “stronghold,” “haven,” and “refuge.”
This is where personal curriculum TikTok would part ways with me. Where Elizabeth Jean lights candles and opens composition notebooks, I’m lobbing questions into a chat window. Same craving for slowness, for depth, for learning that isn’t optimized for anything except my own weird curiosity. Different tools.
And lately, scrolling past yet another video of someone handwriting Greek verb conjugations by candlelight, I’ve started to wonder if my tools are the problem.
The study that made me nervous
A few weeks into my Bible kick, I watched a video that made me want to throw my phone into the Olentangy River.
The title was How ChatGPT Slowly Destroys Your Brain, which, fine, I’m used to the tech panic cycle. But this one had brain scans. EEG readouts showing neural connectivity weakening over time in people who used AI to write essays. Participants who relied on ChatGPT couldn’t even remember what they’d written—83 percent failed to produce a single accurate quote from their own work. The researchers called it “cognitive debt.” Graders called the AI-assisted essays “soulless.”
The study had gone viral in the way these things do: stripped of nuance, flattened into a warning. AI is making you dumber. Your brain on ChatGPT. The machine is eating your mind. I watched the whole breakdown, then sat with my phone in my hand, looking at my open BibleGPT chat, feeling like I’d been caught.
I went and read the actual paper, though.
The MIT researchers didn’t find that AI use universally harms cognition. They found something more specific: people who used ChatGPT from the start of a task showed weaker neural engagement than people who worked alone. Their brains essentially downshifted—less activity in the regions associated with memory, synthesis, and critical thinking. The AI was doing the cognitive heavy lifting, and their minds were happy to let it.
But there was a fourth group in the study that nobody talks about. Participants who had worked without AI for the first three sessions, then were given access to ChatGPT for a final essay. These people showed higher memory recall and increased neural connectivity compared to their earlier sessions.
AI used after you’ve already done the thinking might actually enhance learning. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the timing.
I read that and felt something shift. My practice—the analog-first passes, the margin notes, the commentary deep-dives before I ever open a chat window—wasn’t just a quirk of my process. It was, accidentally, the architecture the research suggests might work.
The Socratic partner thing isn’t incidental either. There’s a growing body of research on AI tutors designed to ask questions rather than give answers—systems that guide learners toward understanding instead of handing them conclusions. One 2024 study found that these Socratic-style AI tutors “support the development of reflection and critical thinking significantly better than standard chatbots.” The difference is whether the AI is doing your thinking or helping you do your own.
I want to believe I’m in the second category. Most days, I think I am. I come to BibleGPT with observations, not blank pages. I ask it to explain what I’ve already noticed, not to notice for me.
But the study also showed something that keeps me honest: the people whose brains were disengaging didn’t know it was happening. They reported high satisfaction with their essays. They felt productive. The cognitive debt was invisible from the inside.
Which leaves me with a question I can’t quite answer: If my reasoning centers were going dark, how would I know?
Is AI the new calculator?
Here’s the mistake everyone keeps making about AI—and it’s the same mistake they made about calculators in the 1970s.
When pocket calculators first showed up in classrooms, educators panicked. Students would forget how to do arithmetic. Mental math would atrophy. What actually happened was more interesting. The good teachers raised the bar. If the calculator could handle computation, then students needed to understand why the computation worked—when to use which operation, how to estimate whether an answer made sense. The tool didn’t replace thinking. It relocated it.
The AI conversation is stuck on the wrong question: Is the technology good or bad? Helpful or harmful? Making us smarter or dumber? But that framing assumes the tool has a fixed effect. It doesn’t. The effect depends entirely on what you’re asking it to do.
There’s a version of AI use that substitutes for cognition—where you hand over the thinking and accept what comes back. This is ChatGPT as ghostwriter, as shortcut, as the path of least resistance. The MIT study caught this version on an EEG: brains in idle, letting the machine do the work.
But there’s another version. AI as interlocutor. As the thing that helps you understand what you’ve already noticed, or points you toward resources you didn’t know existed.
The 1970s math teachers who adapted to calculators didn’t ban the technology or embrace it uncritically. They asked: What does this tool make possible, and what does it make too easy? Then they restructured the practice to keep the thinking where it belonged.
That’s the question I’m trying to answer with BibleGPT. Not whether to use AI, but how to use it without letting it use me.
Elizabeth Jean didn’t start posting curricula because TikTok told her to. She’d been building syllabi for years, alone, for her own satisfaction. The videos came later. Clare Yeo’s book club on good and evil isn’t a performance of learning—it’s learning that happens to be visible. The curriculum club isn’t anti-technology. They’re just particular about what they let in.
Maybe I’m particular too, in my own way. The analog-first passes. The margin notes before the chat window. The Socratic questions instead of the blank-page prompts. I didn’t design the practice to protect my cognition—I designed it because that’s how the learning feels real to me. But it turns out those instincts might be doing more than I knew.
Learning in, through, and despite AI
It’s Friday night again. I’m in my living room, Uncle Fred’s bookshelf holding steady, fifteen study Bibles arranged by translation philosophy. I’ve pulled five or six of my go-tos off the shelf. The NRSVue is open to John 1, where I’m tracing the verbs of perception—see and find and saw and found—as the disciples recognize Jesus for who he is.
On my phone, a chat window is open. I’ve just asked BibleGPT why the Gospel writer keeps hammering these verbs of seeing and finding—whether there’s something in the Greek that makes the repetition more deliberate than it looks in English. The AI is walking me through the vocabulary, the narrative structure, the way recognition becomes a theme that will echo through the whole Gospel.
One of the Bible influencers I follow on YouTube, Faith Womack of Bible Nerd Ministries, has this phrase she uses about God: that God works in, through, and despite you. And God works in, through, and despite the resources he brings across your path. It’s a way of holding multiple truths at once—that you’re an instrument, that you’re also a mess, that grace operates anyway.
I’ve started thinking about AI learning the same way.
In AI: the insights that emerge from the dialogue itself, the back-and-forth that surfaces questions I didn’t know I had.
Through AI: the tool as conduit, pointing me toward commentaries, Hebrew roots, scholarly debates I wouldn’t have found on my own.
Despite AI: the learning that happens when the model gets something wrong, or flattens something I know is more complex, or forces me to articulate why its answer doesn’t satisfy me.
The curriculum club and I are both responding to the same broken thing: a world that’s made it too easy to consume and too hard to think. They’ve chosen to keep the machines out entirely. I’ve chosen to let one in—knowing it might work in, through, or despite my best intentions.
Tonight, in John’s Gospel, I’m watching the disciples learn to see. Andrew finds Peter. Philip finds Nathanael. “Come and see,” Jesus keeps saying. Recognition unfolds slowly, one encounter at a time.
Notes and Errata
The case for using your liberal arts degree. I had way more fun than should be allowed getting to flex my English degree muscles in this Every piece about Frankenstein and AI. To everyone who ever asked, “What are you gonna do with that major?”—writing literary-critical takes on AI metaphors for a business audience, apparently.
Bipolar, AI, and the work that matters. If you’ve been here a while, you know I’m not shy about talking about my experience with bipolar disorder. A few weeks back, Every let me opublish a deeply personal essay about what that feels like at work and how AI has made it possible for me to work in ways that weren’t sustainable before.
Hamilton: 2 Samuel Edition. Because Bible study shouldn’t ALL be serious—I asked ChatGPT to write a parody of “Say No to This” from Hamilton, but from the perspective of King David in 2 Samuel Chapter 11 and oh boy did it deliver:
My other Bible study buddy. She’s a very good girl. Except when she sits where I need to sit.
Stay curious,
Katie P.
Pretty interesting your perspective.