Hey, I’ve been pondering the Dead Internet Theory (DIT) lately and how it might impact society. For those unfamiliar, the DIT suggests that the internet has been mostly abandoned and that the content we see today is generated by AI and curated by large corporations. While this theory might sound far-fetched, I’ve noticed a significant portion of the content in my feeds appears to be AI-generated, making it difficult to distinguish between human-generated and AI-generated content.
As someone who was initially excited about the prospect of having an AI assistant, I’m now concerned about the potential for AI to be used to brainwash people and extract money from them. I can’t help but wonder if most people will even notice or care, as they continue to use social media and other online platforms, oblivious to the fact that they’re being gaslighted into believing what the companies that own the AI want them to believe.
With this in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the DIT and how it might affect society. Do you think it’s a real possibility, or is it just a conspiracy theory? How do you think it will impact the way we use the internet, and what can we do to protect ourselves from the potential negative effects of AI-generated content?
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts on this topic!
I recently saw a reddit thread that was a repost, and every comment was a bot reposting the comments from the last time it was posted. And in the middle of that, there was like a single human commenting on it, not realizing he was intruding on a karma farming circle jerk filled with bots.
I’ll try embedding the image, if it’s too compressed to read I can upload it somewhere else:
You’d think this would make it very easy for reddit admins to find and ban bots.
That would make the site look a lot less popular and tank the share price
Hell, I’m of the opinion that they run some of the bots themselves
Reddit is the frontpage of the DIT. The majority of Reddit is bots.
They have shareholders now, if half the site traffic disappeared (and I feel like that’s being optimistic about the actual number of real people on the site) it would be devastating to the stock price.
They probably don’t mind repost bots. Reposted content is still content, and can be used to attract new users. And the repost bots specifically target popular content, meaning their reposts often do really well.
It’s small, but surprisingly I can read it. In a way, that human is talking to ghosts long since passed.
Whats the point upvotes at all on reddit these days? It’s probably a bot.
i think that dead internet is another form of enshitification that’s more common on platforms that are backed by significant financing. eg reddit, facebook, bluesky, etc.
anecdotally: your experience gets richer on social media if you avoid platforms that describe itself as “general interest” or with investors behind it since both have an interest in trying to attract as many people as possible rather than letting people’s interest organically lead them to your platform; lemmy was a great example of this before the reddit enshitification.
I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
There is still lots of cool stuff on the Internet. The key to finding it is to avoid search engines that have a financial incentives to point you at advertisers instead.
significant portion of the content in my feeds appears to be AI-generated
On which platforms? For me it seems to be true on the big ones I still kind of use because of some other reasons like Facebook and Instagram, but the niche ones like Lemmy and Mastodon don’t.
One exception of the big ones is YouTube, there seems to still be enough humans creating content so it still out weights the AI generated one.
I believe people will still make spaces for themselves online. The bots and enshitification will follow whats popular, but if you keep it small, maybe they won’t notice.
Nathan J. Robinson: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.
But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!
Gonna hand a large advantage to societies that don’t allow this on their social media and regulate AI. Another do nothing: win situation for China for instance. Of course if your country is controlled by people who live off gouging away at societies this will be framed as an advantage, and good luck dissenting on the terms you used to believe were avenues to pressure the powerful.
I use piefed, mastodon, and pixelfed. The only AI stuff i see is the stuff i sought out on purpose. At least afaik.
I think it won’t be abandoned, but we have to find better ways of filtering out AI slop. There are already quite a few search engines with curated networks of personal sites.
Another option is we switch to a different protocol. But internet style networks are too useful for human communication to abandon, I think.
