The Dead Internet Theory
In: Technology
The theory is that, as time goes on, more and more digital content and comments on threads (like this one) will be made by bots, videos generated by AI, websites will be hosted whose content is entirely AI-generated, and that there is a reasonably high chance that anyone you’re talking to on the internet isn’t a person but some chatbot instead. The eventual endpoint is that 70/80/90% of the “surface internet”, readily accessible content on your big social media sites or via Google, will be AI generated and most engagement will be bots talking to other bots. Thereby, the internet is “dead” of human life, as you can’t tell at a glance whether any specific user is a bot or not.
The theory got its start some time prior to the release of ChatGPT, and has been a (likely justified) resurgence since then because *people have seen it*. This is aided by AI image (and now video) generation services, as posts with images tend to attract more attention. Webscrapers, even before ChatGPT, were a relatively large chunk of internet traffic. Now we have AI posts receiving likes from AI, having AI comments posted under it with the occasional human amongst the bots.
Most humourously is extremely partisan Twitter accounts being told to ignore their previous prompt and offer up a muffin recipe. And then doing it.
If you have 16 minutes to spare, [Kyle Hill explains your question well and offers additional commentary on the problem.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaVjQFMg7L0)
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