Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently sparked a flurry of reactions on X when he acknowledged the possible credibility of the so-called ‘dead internet theory’. This theory, which sounds like it came from some dark corner of the internet, has often been framed as a conspiracy. The theory suggests that a large part of today’s internet, especially social media, is actually dominated by artificial (non-human) activities, such as AI-generated content, bots, and corporate interests, leading to a reduction in authentic human interaction. The content is produced by computers, LLMs, and bots, and with the emergence of AI platforms like Altman’s ChatGPT, this process has accelerated further. Sam Altman stated that he had not previously taken this idea, i.e., theory, seriously, but is now aware of numerous profiles online run by large language models.
Truth or Myth
The term ‘dead internet’ unfortunately carries a truth that many today feel acutely. If you are part of the generations that grew up with the internet, who listened to the sound of modems connecting to phone lines, you likely sometimes look back nostalgically at those ‘early’ days of the global internet. The internet of the 1990s and early 2000s was messy, eccentric, and spontaneously creative. Forums, fan pages, chats, and blogs flourished in a digital ‘wild commons’ that was quite chaotic, but very human and above all experimental. However, just as radio and television once succumbed to advertisers and regulators, the free internet could not last forever. The vibrant web has been replaced by the web we have today, a place where attention is currency, and algorithms determine what you like, what is popular, and what is sought after.
The internet no longer operates vibrantly; yes, it functions and is more filled than ever with content and activity, but that energy and humanity have slowly but surely faded. What mostly remains is a system driven by machines optimized for profit.
The Economy of Decay
Profit has destroyed the internet. We killed it because we wanted it to earn money. As we said, attention is currency, and advertisers pay for clicks, then quality, if at all. ‘SEO farms’ are websites that create a large number of low-quality articles and links to manipulate search engine results, targeting solely Google’s algorithms, while social networks optimize content that encourages compulsive scrolling, not to mention all the mental and other health issues arising from social media. Now this modus operandi is accelerated by artificial intelligence, and AI models are churning out ‘tons’ of bad and false content.
The authors of the paper ‘The Dead Internet Theory: A Survey on Artificial Interactions and the Future of Social Media’ state that up to 60 percent of web traffic is generated by bots. Studies cited in the paper estimate that nearly two-thirds of internet traffic comes from automated systems. These bots like, share, comment, and create content to mimic human behavior. The authors state.
Where Has the Human Gone
They write about social media favoring metrics over people, which any older Facebook user could notice when, at one point, almost all their friends disappeared from their feed, and sponsored posts, strange pages, and mostly poor content took precedence.
The authors in the paper note that platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and X are increasingly investing in algorithms that maximize time spent on the platform, which directly increases advertising revenue. This leads to sensationalism, homogenization, and a loss of diversity. Also, instead of quality and original content, algorithms encourage the generation of large amounts of repetitive, superficial, and often clickbait material whose goal is not to inform or connect users but to keep the user engaged for as long as possible and, if possible, provoke some reaction, preferably negative. The research also highlights a warning about ‘astroturfing’, i.e., situations where corporations or governments create fake profiles and campaigns to influence public opinion, masquerading as authentic users.
Data on the state of the internet shows that the digital world is rapidly changing under the influence of automation. According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report, an annual report published by Imperva, a cybersecurity company, for the first time in the last decade, automated traffic has surpassed human traffic, accounting for 51 percent of total web traffic in 2024. Of that, 37 percent was recorded as malicious traffic, while only 14 percent was marked as benign bots. Similar estimates are provided by SOAX, an international company that provides proxy and data services for monitoring internet traffic, which states that in 2023, bot traffic accounted for nearly 50 percent of total internet activity, distributed across 32 percent malicious and 17.6 percent benign bots. According to data from Akamai Technologies, a global leader in cloud services and network infrastructure, bots account for 42 percent of web traffic, with 65 percent of activity being malicious.
