What is the dead internet theory?

How can you really know who on the internet is real and who is not?

That is the basis of what is known as the dead internet theory, a “joke-cum-conspiracy that says if you’re reading these words online, you’re the last person on the internet”, said Prospect. “Everyone else is a bot.”

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The post cited a New York magazine article from 2018 with the headline “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually”, which warned the proliferation of bots was so extreme that some YouTube employees feared the imminent “Inversion”. This is the tipping point when the proportion of fake traffic would prompt YouTube’s systems to see bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic.

Hern cites the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022 and the release of ChatGPT that same year as just two examples of this shift. Large language models, specifically, have led to an explosion of AI-generated material that mimics human-made content. Were a model like GPT-3 to “get loose”, warned Timothy Shoup, of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, then the internet would be “completely unrecognisable”, with 99% to 99.9% of content online AI-generated by 2025 to 2030.