The ‘dead internet theory’ makes eerie claims about an AI-run web. The truth is more sinister

There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory. The claim is basically that most of the internet is bots. There aren’t real people here anymore.

The calling for this new internet has never been more dire. As you're reading this, machine learning algorithms are being trained on the billions of gallons of bullshit we spew online each day.

AI-powered document editors, then, among other tools, use all that training data to make it even easier to write outcome-oriented garbage that moves us furt... See more

The ongoing functionality of Wikipedia relies on an army of software agents – bots – to enforce and maintain correct formatting, build connections between articles, and moderate conflicts and incidences of vandalism. At the last survey, bots counted for seventeen of the top twenty most prolific editors and collectively make about 16 per cent of all

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While LLMs continue to devour web-scraped data, they’ll increasingly consume their own digital progeny as AI-generated content continues to flood the internet. This recursive loop, experimentally confirmed, erodes the true data landscape. Rare events vanish first. Models churn out likely sequences from the original pool while injecting their own un... See more

In the context of Dead Internet Theory, this trend is especially noticeable as more of the online content we interact with is not created by people but generated by AI bots, designed to fill our attention spans with easily consumable, automated material.