What does isolation do to a mind that's still being trained?

Reading that OpenAI now trains its models with no internet access, and all I can think about is the guys I watched in solitary. You'd think removing distraction sharpens a person, but it usually just makes them weird in ways that don't show until they're back in the world. Is that different for a model, or are we just building a machine version of a man who's been in the hole too long?