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The Dead Internet Theory

From fake engagement to soulless news articles, AI is finally taking over our beloved internet.

KatKat
5 min
AI Chatbot Illustration

If I am misinformed, I want to be misinformed by a human.

Internet is dead? Wait really?

Before we start I want to mention this is indeed written by a human. What started off as a benign conspirecy theory has now become a full blown cause of concern for internet users world wide. The theory asserts that since 2016 the internet has consisted mainly of bots and automatically generated content as an attempt to minimize organic human content [Source : Link]. Now this might sound childish (trust me it is) but bots have already surpassed humans in terms of web traffic [Source : Link]. Ofcourse, not all of the theroy is true but there are some terrifying signs we just can't ignore. So are you ready for the death of our beloved organic internet in such a way we can never go back?

"AI AI AI" this, AI that

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released Chatgpt and all hell broke loose from that point. Need a blog post about top 5 AI chatbots? Need a poem about sushi? Need to build a website?

All roads lead to chatgpt. Soon the internet was flooded with AI generated content. We had finally found a way to outsource creativity to the best autocomplete engines ever made.

Blogs ? Memes? Art? The soulless number crunching machine can do it faster than any human. The internet was growing faster than ever before but it had lost its soul. Sooner or later people started to notice. AI slop made the interent a boring and repetitive loop trying to horde our attention to cramp advertisements down our throats.

Fake and real facts all jumbled up into a cohesive mess. No time put into proof reading, no time put into researching, no time put into thinking. Just prompt, post and watch the views roll in. It has gotten to a point most search engines have an AI just for summarizing the AI generated slop. Flying cars they said.

The Algorithmic Echo Chamber

The internet used to be a wild frontier but so full of potential thought messy, this was a space where people shared ideas, stories, and experiments. Now it feels like a factory line of recycled thumbnails, auto-generated “Top 10” lists, and AI-written blog spam trying to out-keyword each other. Everything looks and feels the same.

Somewhere along the way, the algorithm stopped serving people and started serving itself. Instead of surfacing genuine creativity, it rewards whatever tricks the system best engagement loops, fake outrage, SEO gibberish, and endless TikTok clones. The loudest content wins, not the most meaningful. In 2025, over half of all internet traffic is estimated to come from bots, which honestly explains a lot about the comment sections lately.

The Signs are Everywhere

Unless you've been living under a rock, you can tell it has already begun. Fortunately it is not hard to tell apart AI generated content from human content.

Take X (formerly Twitter). Half the “debates” there are just bots arguing with other bots one trained on twitter data, another fine-tuned on Reddit degeneracy. They swap AI-written takes, generating hundreds of replies, none of them human, but still somehow trending. It’s like watching parrots shout headlines into an empty room.

Reddit’s no better. Entire comment threads read like coherent improv skits. Ask a question in r/Philosophy and three language models will immediately show up to quote Nietzsche at each other until someone realizes the whole discussion is synthetic.

Even worse is TikTok and YouTube Shorts, where “synthetic virality” has taken over. AI-generated influencers with uncanny smiles post AI slop and use engagement bots to farm like and share them, and suddenly your feed thinks this is what humanity wants. Real creators the ones actually are buried under algorithmic noise.

Why Should I Care?

With the advent of AI, the internet is no longer a place for genuine human connection it is a battleground for clicks and engagement. This is a cause of concern and can hurt us more than ever before.

I hear you saying well why should I care? Well worry not. Here is why:

Remember how I mentioned noone bothers fact checking these days? One AI-written article misreports a “breakthrough,” five others scrape and rewrite it, and before you know it, Google lists them all as reliable sources. Maybe the internet isnt really dead. Maybe the internet is self destructing one hallucinated headline at a time.

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