( 1 ) In May 2024, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia was the most active threat to the recent US election: “Russia relies on a vast multimedia influence apparatus, which consists of its intelligence services, cyberactors, state media proxies and social media trolls.”
Tangled WebA postmortem of the internet.
Tangled WebA postmortem of the internet.
In May 2024, British musician FKA twigs announced that her virtual counterpart, “AI twigs,” would soon take over her social media posts so that her human self could better focus on her craft, away from the never-ending cycle of online content-making. She was testifying before the US Senate about the dangers of unregulated artificial intelligence. As she highlighted how musicians could use AI as a tool, the singer-songwriter revealed the existence of her own deepfake, which she had trained to mimic her personality and tone of voice. On YouTube, below a video excerpt of her testimony, one user asked: “Did anyone else think that she was the AI version in this video and not actually herself?”
This comment sums up one of the Web’s favorite conspiracies: that the internet is defunct, and we have gone to hell. The “dead internet theory” proposes that the World Wide Web passed away sometime between 2016 and 2018, when humans online were replaced, or at least vastly outnumbered, by bots and artificial intelligence. This, so the theory goes, is all part of a plot devised by the US government and Big Tech companies to “gaslight the entire human population.” And while the last quote may elicit eye rolls (there is no proof that the rise of automated activity online is part of a global scheme to manipulate people), one would be foolish to dismiss the internet’s rumored passing altogether.
The few real humans left online may have noticed something is off. On X, formerly Twitter, which Elon Musk swore to rid of bots with a premium subscription service, posts denouncing the proliferation of AI-generated tweets are generally met with swift responses from bots answering one another. Not to mention, manipulation is happening: Content farms flood the web with low-quality automated text-to-image posts that sway our conversations online. Social media platforms are open about creating AI influencers to push advertisements onto their real followers. And for almost a decade, studies have confirmed the influence of Russian bots on Western elections.1
“[The dead internet theory] is a useful label for the eerie feeling that the internet that we knew and loved, by humans and for humans, is dead,” Jake Renzella, a lecturer and director of computer science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, says of the phenomenon. He points out that more than half of all internet activity, meaning comments, likes, posts or articles, is already bot- or AI-generated. That number will be closer to 90 percent by 2026, according to a study by Europol, a European law enforcement agency. This means that not only are we being targeted by AI-generated clickbait, but that the clickbait itself is gaining AI-generated likes and comments, blurring the distinction between human engagement and fake digital interactions.
