The Dead Internet Theory
In: Technology
You are the only one on the internet.
Everything else is bots talking to each other.
Everything is empty and dead.
…is the theory.
Have you watched this funny video about cats already? I also think you would like these news articles. Bleek bloop
The theory is that internet content is generated by bots and bots are the ones interacting with that content.
At any moment, lots of material is being posted to the Internet: text, images, videos, messages. Plus a lot of “behind the scenes” stuff that you may never see directly, but maybe it’s code that generates content, or it’s metadata for search engines.
At the same moment, lots of material is being viewed on the Internet. A zillion requests to a zillion servers to show me this, log me in to that, and so on.
It used to be that humans were the ones doing this. He posts, she reads, they talk. But now, most content is generated by bots, and most views come from bots.
Search for a banana bread recipe, and the results simply aren’t for you. A program generated the text, a program ranked it for search, a program injected ads, a program tracked how long visitors stayed… and none of these programs knows what banana bread is.
The theory is that the internet is *mostly* bots, and AI generated information. Many sports articles/game recaps, Top 10 restaurant lists, etc are AI generated.
I’m sure a lot of content on Reddit is bots.
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I once saw a spam ad here on reddit for t-shirts or something. I clicked on the username and saw months earlier they had one totally generics post in r/movies about lotr. The account sat idle for a few months, then started spewing spam. Reddit won’t just let a brand new account do a bunch of posts across subreddits, so if you want to spam, you need to have the account mimic real human behavior with some legitimate looking posts, then once the account seems legit to reddit it can get a lot more spam out before getting shut down. Now who was commenting on that lotr post? Very possibly other bot accounts working in tandem with the one that posted the thread to build up legitimacy. If you had clicked on that thread and commented, would you have been the only human present, interacting with bots who are just there to karma farm? ChatGPT things have made this even worse, you can even be having a 1-1 conversation with a bot, scammers do it all the time.
Dead Internet Theory is the extreme version about it where such a high percentage of internet content is bots trying to game some system or other, that you’re almost always just interacting with them. I don’t know how many people think this is literally true, but there’s definitely a trend in that direction.
People have already pointed out the core of the theory that the internet is just bots now. The reason it has been gaining popularity is because it is becoming more true. It was originally just a conspiracy theory, but as nation states use AI bots to inject propoganda, companies use ad bots, chat bots, customer service bots. Content farms start using Chat GPT more than cheap offsboring. They are even able to make AI video now will probably start flooding Instagram and TikTok if it isn’t already. It does feel like the bots are slowly taking over, and the interest in dead internet theory grows…
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)
Slightly more than ELI5.
There are people that use bots to boost their presence.
Have you ever seen a tweet with the same 3 comments repeated over and over on it? Or a YouTuber with 1000 subs with a 100,000 views on a video for no reason? These people are using bots to artificially inflate the metrics a website’s algorithm uses to deliver content. Essentially, they’re using robots to try to game the system.
This is done by more than just users of a website. It can be done by the website themselves. When a website makes its money by selling space for ads, there is an incentive to make it look like many people use the website and therefore see the ads. Bots can be used for this.
The dead internet theory comes from a question that arises from this. Are the comments around you real? Or are they bots used by the website to make them appear more popular? Are there ANY other real people on the internet? Or are they all bots?
When people create fake engagement for money, where does it end? With an internet comprised entirely of bots and actual people aren’t needed.
Tl;Dr – if you can make a website look good on paper, actual human users aren’t needed.
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