Reddit’s CEO and Redditors alike seem to agree that the internet is now dominated by bots and AI-generated content, to disastrous effects.
A big conversation is taking place right now about how much of the internet is actually still human. People have been circling around this topic for a long time, but Reddit co-founder and CEO Alexis Ohanian has recently lent his voice to the conversation, sparking renewed interest among members of the community. Ohanian went on an episode of TBPM and stated that „much of the internet is now just dead“, citing the „dead internet theory“ and asserting that so much of the internet is now AI and bot-fueled that internet users are losing that feeling of human-to-human connection that we all value so much.
Shortly after this episode of TBPM, dozens of Redditors came together in a Reddit thread to share that they agreed with his assessment. Many were in consensus about how an inordinate amount of the internet is now controlled by automated software, and that it feels like less and less of the online world is being directly shaped by human intent. Some even argued that the internet is rapidly progressing toward a place where bots are more often than not just producing ads for other bots.
Procedurally-generated content and automated spam have been issues for over a decade, but the advent of AI-generated content is taking these previous inconveniences to new levels. This ouroboros of content creation and consumption may end up causing more problems than it resolves, both for the advertisers and those who are being advertised to.What is the ‚dead internet theory‘?
Before we get too deep into the discussion, let’s first go over what the „dead internet theory“ is and how it came about. Discussions about the rise in bot-generated content have been circulating for over a decade, but one of the first instances of its use was in an anonymous post that appeared on 4Chan’s /x/ board in September 2020. The original version of this theory posited that the internet was being run by a cloak-and-dagger cohort of powerful individuals behind the scenes, as well as a more visible league of paid influencers. It suggested that this was by design, intended as a means of controlling attention and feeding consumers into a never-ending cycle of advertising and consumption.
The „dead internet theory“, in its original form, has been widely disregarded by many critics as a conspiracy theory. New Models founder Caroline Busta called it a „paranoid fantasy“ in an interview with The Atlantic, while Robert Mariani, writing in The New Atlantis, stated that the theory „reads like a mix between a genuinely held conspiracy theory and a collaborative creepypasta — an internet urban legend written to both amuse and scare its readers with tales on the edge of plausibility.
