Brain Rot Slang as AI Resistance: A Socio–Motivational Framework

The mainstreaming of generative AI tools has coincided with renewed attention to youth slang, exemplified by Oxford University Press’s 2024 Word of the Year “brain rot” and Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year “67”. These trends have intensified concerns about the spread of semantically opaque, deliberately nonsensical slang among Generation Alpha, often framed as evidence of mental or cognitive decline. We propose a socio-motivational framework that reframes brain rot slang in youths as a socially and psychologically meaningful form of everyday resistance to AI-shaped communication environments. Drawing on social identity theory, we argue that brain rot slang operates as a social creativity strategy that preserves human in-group distinctiveness against AI as a quasi out-group, shifting linguistic competition away from domains where AI excels and toward context-bound, rapidly evolving, absurd expressions. Integrating self-determination theory, engaging in the vernacular play of brain rot slang fulfils basic psychological needs by fostering relatedness through shared humour and peer recognition, supporting autonomy in self-expression, and building competence through mastery of rapidly changing interactional codes that maintain linguistic agency rather than offloading language generation to AI. Taken together, we outline a process model in which AI-shaped communication environments heighten threats to social identity motives and basic psychological needs, increasing brain rot slang use that may in turn buffer these threats. This perspective positions brain rot slang not as a deficit or pathology, but as a patterned form of AI resistance through which youths negotiate agency, competence, relatedness, and identity, in an increasingly AI-mediated communicative space.