\u201ci never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now,\u201d wrote Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, last week on X in his typical all-lowercase style. <\/p>\n
Altman, CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, the world\u2019s most popular AI text generator, drew irony on X. \u201cYou\u2019re absolutely right! This observation isn\u2019t just smart\u2014it shows you\u2019re operating on a higher level,\u201d wrote<\/a> one user, mimicking the sycophantic tone of ChatGPT text.\u00a0<\/p>\n Altman was referring to an idea popularized by a 2021 post on the online forum Agora Road\u2019s Macintosh Cafe: that the internet, once vibrant with human life, was now dead, run entirely by bots and for bots. \u201cThe Internet feels empty and devoid of people,\u201d wrote<\/a> IlluminatiPirate, the pseudonymous author of the theory, at the time. Gone was the promise of free exchange between people. The internet had been \u201chijacked by a powerful few.\u201d<\/p>\n A conspiracy theory<\/p>\n In 2021, almost two years before the launch of ChatGPT, the idea that robots ran the internet sounded far-fetched, as did the explanation that \u201cthe U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.\u201d The Atlantic ran a story on the theory with the headline \u201cThe ‘Dead-Internet Theory’ Is Wrong but Feels True.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Bots\u2014automated computer scripts ranking websites for search engines and social media content for platforms\u2014were part of the internet, but they couldn\u2019t generate convincing content.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn’t have AI working at that scale where you actually really could have believable AI accounts running the internet,\u201d Adam Aleksic, a linguist and author of Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, told TIME. The dead internet theory \u201cused to be a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory, but it’s looking a lot more real.\u201d<\/p>\n Death of the internet<\/p>\n The business model of content creation on the internet is simple: advertisers pay creators for the eyeballs that their content attracts, which allows creators to go on creating\u2014and humans to go on looking at things they like. Except that, in the last few years, humans have become surplus to requirements.<\/p>\n A March report by Adalytics, an ad analysis firm, found millions of cases since at least 2020 in which ads for brands from Pfizer to the NYPD were served to bots crawling the web rather than real users, undermining the advertisers\u2019 investment. In some comical cases<\/a>, the ads were served by Google\u2019s ad server to Google\u2019s own bots. The fraction of internet traffic made up by bots has grown in the last ten years according to Imperva<\/a>, a cybersecurity company. In 2024, it hit 51 percent, the first time it had surpassed the share of internet traffic from humans.<\/p>\n Even if some of the denizens of the internet were bots, they were mostly passive observers. That changed in 2022 when Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI kicked off the generative AI race. Since then, the quantity of AI-generated content has skyrocketed. The fraction of websites in Google\u2019s top-20 search results that contain AI-generated content has increased 400% since ChatGPT was released, according<\/a> to Originality AI, a startup that builds AI content detectors.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt is in the business interest of platforms to cram slop down our throats, because over time, if there’s more AI accounts, they have to pay human creators less,\u201d said Aleksic.<\/p>\n Search engines like Google began providing AI summaries of articles on the internet. Rather than having to visit content creators\u2019 pages, users could get an overview without leaving the search engine. Fewer clicks on content meant less advertising revenue flowing to creators.<\/p>\n As the sophistication of AI-generated content increases, its purview has transcended social media platforms. In August, Dispatch reported<\/a> that stories published by \u201cMargaux Blanchard\u201d in Wired and at least five other outlets had been taken down after the author turned out to be an AI. For scammers with a creative flair, AI presents a novel way to make a quick buck.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thus, IlluminatiPirate\u2019s vision of a virtual wasteland created by and for bots is more plausible than ever.<\/p>\n The human cost<\/p>\n The rising tide of \u201cslop\u201d is causing problems for AI developers, too. LLMs, or large language models, like ChatGPT are trained on the internet. If AI-served summaries continue to divert profits from original content creators, high quality content may dry up\u2014leaving model developers with nothing to train on. A paper published in Nature<\/a> in 2024 showed that AI models \u201ccollapse\u201d when trained on data that they themselves generated.<\/p>\n In response, some cloud providers, such as Cloudflare, have proposed limiting access to the websites they host and forcing bots to pay to enter. This could help creators recapture the revenue they need to keep on creating. \u201cMy utopian vision is a world where humans get content for free, and robots have to pay a ton for it,\u201d Matthew Prince, the company\u2019s CEO told TIME in an earlier interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n The stakes are higher than just the internet. Humans, like large language models, learn from what they read. It\u2019s not \u201cjust that bots are surrounding us,\u201d said Aleksic. \u201cIt’s that we are starting to become more like the bots.\u201d In July, Scientific American reported that words commonly used by ChatGPT, like \u201cdelve\u201d and \u201cmeticulous,\u201d started showing up in conversational podcasts more often after the product\u2019s release in 2022. \u201creal people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak\u201d Altman observed in a post<\/a> on Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing inherently bad about the usage of language changing. But the algorithms that curate what we see online \u201calready represent reality differently than it actually exists\u201d by promoting extreme content from human users. AI-generation could unmoor the collective reality further, by reducing human input that anchors online discourse in what real people think.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a growing perception gap in America where people think that other people’s views are more extreme than they actually are,\u201d said Aleksic. \u201cIt’s AI psychosis on a mass scale.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201ci never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-8496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}