We’ve all probably heard of it during our travels on the web. The Dead Internet Theory (cue thunder crashing, someone screaming in the distance) initially started as a light-hearted joke, something to get you thinking a bit: what if you are alone out there in the interwebs, and most things you’ve interacted with are simply façades of non-humans? While this was pretty difficult to believe as a real thing back then (whenever “then” is, but probably in the ’10s), I can’t help but shake the feeling that we’re slowly approaching that point right now, and much so with the ubiquity and proliferation of generative AI and how quickly it took the world offline and the internet online by storm.

What do authenticity and connection mean to you?

A core part of the Theory is the fact that genuine human activity — us interacting and bonding the way we do as people — is threatened. How close are we to that reality now? How far have we gone from the bygone days of the personal internet and one that feels over-minimalistic and somehow stripped of the things that make it — and us on it — feel human? Colours turn to white (light mode!) or black (dark mode!), fonts become just Inter (not that bad of a font though), and everything feels almost stuffy somehow.

This reminds me of how we’ve always felt like the past was better somehow — more vivid, peaceful, brighter, warmer. I can’t exactly recall what the early internet was like, especially since I was born around the time when it really took off and didn’t really have that much access to it growing up. At the same time, looking at websites from years ago, they all have this weird sense of community behind them — of connection.

Consider the interactions that we’re having with each other today. How deep do you feel they go? When you connect with someone online today, how much do you need to interact with them — and how much do you feel like you need to share — to ignite a sense of kinship? It doesn’t have to be a stranger you haven’t met; it can even be friends who you’ve drifted away from over the years. Even then, how true and genuine do you think they are? I feel like social media has made it the norm to present an image of yourself enviable for others to notice, and only a few have broken out of its bounds to define such media for themselves.

While the Dead Internet Theory brings up a more technological crisis (robots, robots everywhere), there’s also this underlying sense of loneliness that I’m feeling from the internet we have today that transcends just the presence of bots. It’s hard to connect over an internet with many dangers — malware far from just being the only bad thing out there today — so how far have we gone in creating a safe space where connections can be forged, just like the internet once (at least popularly) was?

The internet was already dead, and we’re just living in it

…is one way to look at it. You can’t help but think this when you consider the fact that the internet is nowadays widely commercialised, with ads being just as commonplace as online friends you meet every day. Beyond just that, bot activity has never been higher on the internet; in the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report, almost half — 49.6% — of the internet’s traffic came from bots. I never realised the traffic was that high — I thought most of them were only scrapers.

It might’ve already begun before we even realised it. I remember during good ol’ Blogger days (again, I’m not that old) that I’d patiently wait for interesting comments from anyone — I mean anyone — to validate my hastily-written slop of writing. What I only got were accounts trying to promote stuff and other blogs, which kinda made me scratch my head a little bit and walk away from writing (note, you shouldn’t write just to impress internet strangers who probably know nothing about you anyway).

Another aspect that seems slightly tangential but somewhat relevant is the deroding trust we seem to have within the internet, and in particular with the privacy of our data. Of course, there’s that saying about how nothing on the internet is truly gone forever, and that might make people more cautious about the things they share online. While I think that’s great in today’s advertising and marketing-oriented internet, it might mean that it causes us to hold back in truly forming deeper connections with each other (though, note: I think, compared to real-life interactions and relationships, the ones we have over the internet usually can be superficial at best).

Gen AI as the catalyst?

There’s recent news within the Meta space about introducing AI-generated bot accounts, managing them as if they represented real people with real backgrounds. Personally, that sounds as Black Mirror as it can get. While they probably had some good intentions behind making such a move — perhaps finding and bringing people who can bond over a common shared interest together — I think it might’ve been a bad move. Not only has Meta turned a 180° on their previous policy about segregating AI-generated content from real human content, but it also doesn’t bode well for humans when they’re interacting with something that isn’t human pretending to be one (also another Black Mirror episode, huh).

I’m not saying that gen AI is a bad thing in social media space, or that it entirely shouldn’t be there (though, all the AI-generated media I’ve seen can easily leave a cringe compilation in the dust in a cringefest competition), but we shouldn’t be approaching with the idea that gen AI bots should interact with humans like friends than tools — at least, not yet, anyway. The reactions from real people have been reasonably sour, and it shows that, at least on the human-to-human front, we’re safe enough to say no to artificial interactions for now (inb4 everything was artificial all along).

The main underline here is that the push of such gen AI stuff means that there is less authenticity going on in the internet. AI-generated content and personas have the potential to overshadow our genuine, human interactions, and as if it isn’t already, make it much more harder for us to tell apart what’s real from what’s not. And that is the primary concern of the Dead Internet Theory: that you aren’t sure what you’re interacting with is even a real human being at the end of the screen, but just a bot all along.

Where do we go from here?

I must admit, the prose in this post seems pretty negative and cynical about things. But that isn’t to say that the internet today is bad, we’re all truly alone. We’re still at a crossroads of deciding how gen AI and other tech that contribute to this feeling are being used, and I think that opens up the opportunity to give our inputs — just as we have with artificial AI-managed social media accounts — and how we want to use them. Some components to the Theory aren’t new — the internet today is riddled with bots, mostly to push marketing campaigns, others to track where you go — but we’re still thriving today as people if we choose to stick with those we already know. And for those of us who love to venture into the unknown, time and again we’ve shown how we aren’t afraid to call things bluff and truly discern things for ourselves.

To me, while it might seem we’re headed towards the direction of the Dead Internet Theory, we’re not there just yet. On the other hand, it’s beginning to feel like a matter of when we get there, not if. I guess that just means we should appreciate the time we have spent with actual people that we may or may not know out there on the internet. It’s pretty exciting to see where we’re headed into the next few years, and seeing how — or where — developments in technology will take us.

For now, you can be sure that this was written 100% by a human. If you’re a bot, beep boop, meep morp.