While Pirooz Romouzi and Jackie Ni were classmates at Sage Hill School in Newport Beach, California, they learned one thing while tutoring other students: Attention spans were depleting. Reaching students through traditional methods proved difficult, and utilizing online trends in lesson plans was an effective way to captivate the classroom.

Despite attending different universities, the two have become founding members of Memenome, a viral study tool that uses artificial intelligence to transcribe PDFs into “brainrot.” Romouzi graduated from USC in Fall 2024 and serves as Memenome’s chief marketing officer while Ni is a senior at Columbia University majoring in political science and computer science, taking a gap year to serve as chief executive officer.

Since the establishment of its PDF to brainrot study tool Oct. 27, 2024, Memenome’s TikTok account has gained over 720,000 likes, and the website recorded over 400,000 active users by the end of the year.

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On its homepage, Memenome claims to “supercharge learning with engaging content” by converting course material from its original format to a quick-flashing summarized version, incorporating slang common among younger generations. 

The text is narrated by an AI-generated voice and accompanied by footage of the popular video games Subway Surfers and Minecraft. Users can also change the website’s settings to generate videos under certain themes consistent with online trends like “Talking Fish” and “hopecore.”

Their most viral TikTok demonstrating the conversion process has gained over 3.9 million views. In the video, a summarized version of biology notes flashes on the screen over Minecraft parkour gameplay while an AI voice reads the content aloud. The video, titled “Mitochondria: The Hype House of the Cell,” introduces the organelle as “the ultimate MVPs of cell life, forever grinding that oxidation game like they on Twitch 24/7.”

Memenome’s founders say they drew on their experience with education to create their study tool. In high school, Romouzi taught English to students as a volunteer for the Suwandi Foundation, a service organization based in Bali, Indonesia. Romouzi said he felt compelled to address student needs after experiencing difficulty retaining students’ attention as a tutor.

“What I noticed is, especially with the younger students but even the older students, the attention spans are not always the best,” Romouzi said. “I think it’s only getting worse each year … so we’re trying to tackle that attention span issue that we’ve both noticed by creating a tool that really like engages the classroom and makes the students excited to learn the material.”

Ni said he first saw the value of trend-based study tools while tutoring middle school students whose depleting attention spans made fun a necessary part of teaching them. Including certain elements in lessons, such as memes and the popular video game “Among Us,” helped engage students with the lesson material, he said.

“When you did stuff like you included memes and you talked kind of the language of the students, they tend to pay attention more,” Ni said. 

Ni said his passion for creating an educational tool was reignited after he developed a previously successful “Brainrot Translator” in April of 2024, amassing over 100,000 users. 

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, students are using this for their fanfiction, for bible verses, for their AP Biology notes,’” Ni said. “‘Maybe it’s possible students are kind of using this to make retaining information more fun.’”

Romouzi said Memenome can help students learn in the current landscape by adopting an approach that recognizes depleting attention spans.

“This is the reality of our world,” Romouzi said. “The attention spans are that bad, and if we’re kind of playing into that and using those short attention spans as a given rather than fighting the attention span, I think that would create a solution for a lot of people in today’s world.”

Arjun Bedi, a junior majoring in computer science, said the study tool could be useful for general education classes that require memorization rather than technical understanding of course material.

“That could be really useful because then it’s just like a connection I have in my brain from something that I love to something I don’t really care about,” Bedi said.

While some students may use the tool for a more convenient study experience, Ni said it could be a key instrument going forward for struggling students to keep up in the classroom.

“Society is moving toward one direction, and if you let the brains rot, they will rot, right?” Ni said. “But what we’re trying to do is use brainrot to fight brainrot.”