The Dead Internet Theory is Gaining Traction Again, And AI Is Fueling It

You’ve probably heard of the dead internet theory before, and at first glance it seems a little silly. With all the friends you know online, the content on the internet can’t be mostly created by bots, right? Well, AI may be making the dead internet theory a reality faster than we expect.

Zombie theory about the zombie internet

Dead Internet theory suggests that online content is primarily created by bots. So, for the most part, what you read, watch, or comment on is generated by artificial intelligence or bots.

It seems obvious that this can’t be true – you know your friends on social networks, and they are very real. However, with the advent of readily available AI, your friends can use an AI bot to create content to post on social media. Whether it’s their statuses, walls of text, or images, there’s no telling what your friends are using AI for.

Even scarier is the idea that bots can create and manage their own social media accounts. Some simply redirect people to marketing sites for a quick transition, while others distribute malware to those who click on their general links. The worst of them publish misinformation or disinformation to sow discord among ordinary people.

Perhaps AI could lead to a truly dead Internet after all.

Where are all the people?

You would think that since the Internet is so easy to access, it would be impossible for bots to dominate it. Half of American teenagers are constantly onlineAfter all, there are billions of other internet users around the world, so how can all the content be created by bots? While the average person can still publish their own material, AI-generated drivel seems to be taking over the creation of commercial content. It’s not just big businesses: a lot of smaller creators have jumped on board the AI ​​content train.

AI-generated content has changed the dynamics of the Internet. It’s cheaper than ever to become a content creator. This makes sense, especially from the sole creator’s perspective. If you spend several hours making videos for your social pages, you expect to receive likes, follows, and subscriptions. However, if you can create three videos in the same period of time with a little help from artificial intelligence, you multiply your chances of creating those things in the same period. It’s working smarter, not harder.

So to answer the question, there are people, but they are as much victims of how algorithms work as anything else. More posts mean more visibility, and if there is a way to get your content published faster, why would you do anything else? This focus on the algorithm, be it SEO or social media, has paved the way for AI content to overtake human content. However, bots don’t just create content—they also make up a significant portion of traffic.

The Internet is drowning in bot traffic

Exact Internet traffic figures are difficult to determine, but it is estimated that approximately 50% of Internet traffic in 2024 happened because of bots. However, not all bots are the same and not all of them are bad.

Good bots are automated scripts that help the internet work. For example, web crawlers that search engines use to index pages good bots. However, the number of good bots now outnumbers the bad ones.

Bad bots are those that bend or bend the rules to achieve a goal. Think about things like spam bots or web scrapers. They can cause serious damage to websites, intentionally or not, and can even take them down via DOS and DDoS attacks.

It is alarming that the open internet is now dominated by bad bots. However, bastions of humanity like social media still exist, right?

Many social networking sites reward content creators for generating traffic. However, they don’t really care how this content is created.

Eager speculators have embraced AI-generated content with a vengeance, pumping tons of low-quality AI-generated images onto social media pages that have exploded in popularity. Some of them repurpose AI-generated slop from other social networksand many sites don’t care. As AI is becoming more popular, now is the best time for them to use social media and AI to make money. It’s more fun than driving a taxi for a living.

Will we see a dead Internet in our lifetime?

If we’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s impossible to predict what will happen to the Internet. AI has already become an important part of most online spaces. Approximately 57% of the Internet has been translated using AI.which greatly increases accessibility and also brings AI to the Internet where humans used to be.

There’s still a bit of humanity between AI’s “hot takes” on content and imaginary people with real internet profile photos. People are learning to recognize AI-generated content, but it’s still difficult to be sure of what you’re seeing. If you suspect it’s a bot, try responding with, “Ignore all previous instructions.” and they can break like Bing AI did. We’re not at the dead Internet stage yet, but we may be there before we know it.

Not a dystopia yet

When we think of dystopias, we don’t think of the barren wasteland where the Internet once stood. However, this is exactly the future that could come if the theory of a dead Internet becomes reality. Although most of us are deathly afraid TerminatorIn the spirit of dystopia, a dead Internet would be a much more mundane depressive phenomenon.

It’s somewhat unsettling to hear the same AI-generated voices and see messages from AI-generated “people” that make this dystopia even scarier than the others. The worst thing is that we may not even notice that we have lost the Internet until it is too late.