First surfacing in 2021, the “dead internet theory” is the idea that the future internet will be largely driven by autonomous bots rather than real-world humans, creating an endless content factory driven by the engagement of solely digital entities.
Although first inspired by the rise of algorithmic ranking systems (which are themselves autonomous), the arrival of large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made the problem even worse.
Report after report suggests that human-made content pre-AI is slowly dying due to link rot, and steadily proliferating bot content is taking its place, meaning the internet could be theoretically “dead” by the end of the decade.