Science & Technology

'Dead Internet theory' resurfaces as Meta opens AI user floodgates

By T.K. Randall
January 3, 2025

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) 'Dead Internet theory', which has been around for a few years now, is the controversial idea that the Internet has been almost completely taken over by bots and AI users and that most of the content and social media posts you read were not actually written by human beings.

As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, this concept certainly doesn't seem all that impossible and we've already seen how easily AI-generated content can fool people into believing that it is the real deal.

While it's difficult to imagine that the majority of content on the Internet is generated by AI, in the near future the potential for this to become a reality is likely to increase exponentially.

Such a future became all the more likely recently when Meta - the company behind social media giants Facebook and Instagram - revealed that it was working on a plan to enable its users to create AI characters and that it expected AI accounts to become commonplace in the near future.Meta is not alone in doing this either - other platforms also have similar plans.

This means that, given how sophisticated AI chatbots have already become, we could genuinely see a future in which a large percentage of the content online has been generated by computers.

Telling AI content apart from human content will become increasingly challenging.

Whether this will mean that dead Internet theory has actually come true, however, will likely remain a matter of debate.

Source: The Debrief

Tags: Internet, Artificial Intelligence