The internet will soon be 95% AI-written

Dead internet theory is fast becoming dead internet fact.

Written by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.

There’s an intriguing idea called the dead internet theory. It says that the internet already is – or will soon be – mostly populated by bots, and that most of them are controlled by actors with ulterior motives. Wikipedia describes it as a conspiracy theory, which it is (though not in the sense of being wrong). A conspiracy theory is simply a theory that says some people are colluding to achieve a goal using unscrupulous or illegal means.

In the current age of large language models (LLMs) with human-like verbal skills, it’s easy to see how this would work. Take a trivial example: some companies sell products on online marketplaces like Amazon, ebay and AliExpress. To help consumers decide what products to buy, the sites have review sections, as do most other large online vendors. Sellers have a financial interest in getting good reviews for their products, so they can try to convince consumers to leave a good review when they buy a product. However, they can also write fake reviews themselves. Depending on what counter-measures are in place, this may involve selling their own products to themselves and paying the marketplace fee plus any taxes. Still, it can be worth it if the market for selling the items is large enough and the fees and taxes are low enough. Indeed, the problem is already extremely widespread.