In the past four years, the “dead internet theory” emerged as a conspiracy, claiming the online world was being taken over by bots and automatically generated content run by an algorithm that would eventually thwart human activity online and control the global population.
According to Alexis Ohanian, investor and Reddit cofounder, there’s some truth to the idea, and a new era of social media will emerge because of it.
“You all prove the point that so much of the internet is now just dead—this whole dead internet theory, right? Whether it’s botted, whether it’s quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop,” Ohanian said speaking to the hosts of the TBPN podcast on Monday. “Having proof of life, like live viewers and live content, is really f–king valuable to hold attention.”
Last month, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman came to a similar conclusion: “I never took the dead internet theory that seriously, but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now,” he wrote on X.
In a very 21st-century trajectory, the theory began as a 2021 post by “IlluminatiPirate” on the Agora Road forum and was soon written about in The Atlantic under the headline “Maybe you missed it, but the internet ‘died’ five years ago.” (As of press time, the original thread had been viewed over 363,000 times.) Data from cybersecurity firms increasingly confirms the worldview of the IlluminatiPirate. Nearly one-third of all internet traffic has come from bots over the past 12 months, according to data from cybersecurity platform Cloudflare. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report in July found nearly 50% of internet traffic was coming from nonhuman sources, including 20% from “bad bots” taking part in malicious activities.
While these bots’ actions can be as innocuous as generating generic, if not nonsensical, comments on social media posts, they can also generate fake page views, user impressions, and session durations, skewing and inflating metrics that may be used to misrepresent a company’s strength. As business leaders and economists begin to take concerns of an AI bubble more seriously, the proliferation of loose internet bots has become more alarming because of their potential to distort data key to assessing the sustainability and growth of emerging tech companies.
Making the internet more human
For Ohanian, the solution to mitigating the power of bots on the internet is perhaps more romantic: Apps should be more human.
“I think we‘ll see a next generation of social media emerge that’s verifiably human because it’s all going down in the group chats now—that is not novel tech,” Ohanian said. “There’s got to be some next iteration of that, because that’s where all of us are getting our, really, best info now.”
Described by New York Times culture critic Sophie Haigney as the “anti-social-media,” the group chat has emerged as a popular—and private—forum for discussing cultural phenomena, personal lives, and politics.
Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith reported in April that group chats were so influential they had even “changed America.” A Signal group named Chatham House, revolving mainly around venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, had “fueled a new alliance” between the tech industry and the right wing of U.S. politics, Smith reported, while uncovering other “power group chats” on Signal and WhatsApp, and even a China-friendly group on WeChat.
The hypothetical switch to platforms based on more intimate human interactions is in part a result not only of the rise of bots, but of a crowded AI space that leaves only room right now for companies looking less to challenge juggernauts like OpenAI and Google, and more to create off-the-wall products to delight, Ohanian noted.
“I think we’re gonna get really delightful, fun consumer experiences where some scrappy founders in Brooklyn, like the Doji guys, can say, ‘Hey, let’s make shopping fun again using this tech,’” he said.
Doji is an AI-based platform that allows avatars of users to try on various outfits. Ohanian’s venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six participated in the startup’s $14 million seed funding round earlier this year.
“How do you build the stuff that’s actually dope for the end consumer?” Ohanian said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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