Gone are the days when trolls and pop-up ads were destroying the internet. Those days seem quaint in retrospect. Today, the internet is being cannibalized by a swarm of AI bots munching data across the internet, maybe even occasionally posing as a real person to get you to buy their cryptocoin.
According to Cloudflare, nearly one-third of all internet traffic now comes from bots. These are the sophisticated digital vacuum cleaners from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that suck up website data to train their AI models.
All this comes as OpenAI’s Sam Altman somehow just started realizing that a lot of the people on the internet might be fake. In fact, entire portions of the internet are comprised of bots communicating with other bots, with little to no human involvement in any of it.
At this rate, he’ll have an epiphany about his involvement in all of it in about 20 years.
In the early days of the internet, before moneyed interests did what they unfortunately do best—move in, kill independent voices and small communities, and monetize—sites allowed search engines to scrape content.
In return, they got traffic. Those clicks and views turned into ad revenue. That was the social contract of the internet. Now, users ask chatbots questions, and instead of sending them to the original source, the bots spit out neatly packaged answers.
These answers are regulating the sources to a series of teeny tiny dots in the right-hand corner that look explicitly designed to be easily missed. Entire Twitter and Reddit threads look like two algorithms bickering back and forth without a shred of humanity among them.
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The Internet, once a fun, vivacious, and wide-open creative space, now seems as morose as the dead malls that linger around, barely clinging to life. The internet is the hollowed-out shell of a Pottery Barn.
There’s a name for it: the Dead Internet Theory. It used to be a fringe idea, but it’s now seeming like the more likely outcome.
It’s not just that the internet has gotten emptier; it’s become less handmade. There was always a sense of weirdness lurking around every corner. But it felt nice, even if it was a little disturbing, because you’re getting it from an actual human being.
You’re getting someone’s perspective on life. Now the weirdness comes from the viewpoint of corporate bots who have chewed up and spit out the genuine, hard-earned creativity of millions of people who are now getting drowned out by copies of copies of copies of their own voices. And each iteration degraded their uniqueness like an old VHS tape has been taped over so many times that it’s just static and noise.
What used to be a digital bazaar of human thought has morphed into a bunch of video game NPCs barking random snippets of disjointed dialogue at each other.
A 2024 report from cybersecurity software company Imperva estimates that the problem is even worse than Cloudflare’s numbers suggest. They claim that nearly half of all internet traffic is now automated. And that number is still growing.
If you’re young and pine for the days when the internet was more human, understand that those humans didn’t abandon the internet. Instead, it was corporate executives with dollar signs in their eyes doing the only thing they know how to do: replace humans with machines.
Just in this case, the human element being replaced wasn’t welding together parts of a car; it was some of the most fundamental aspects of human civilization: communication and self-expression.
Big Tech is strip-mining the internet for content and leaving behind an empty shell.
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