Hey, I’ve been pondering the Dead Internet Theory (DIT) lately and how it might impact society. For those unfamiliar, the DIT suggests that the internet has been mostly abandoned and that the content we see today is generated by AI and curated by large corporations. While this theory might sound far-fetched, I’ve noticed a significant portion of the content in my feeds appears to be AI-generated, making it difficult to distinguish between human-generated and AI-generated content.
As someone who was initially excited about the prospect of having an AI assistant, I’m now concerned about the potential for AI to be used to brainwash people and extract money from them. I can’t help but wonder if most people will even notice or care, as they continue to use social media and other online platforms, oblivious to the fact that they’re being gaslighted into believing what the companies that own the AI want them to believe.
With this in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the DIT and how it might affect society. Do you think it’s a real possibility, or is it just a conspiracy theory? How do you think it will impact the way we use the internet, and what can we do to protect ourselves from the potential negative effects of AI-generated content?
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts on this topic!
I recently saw a reddit thread that was a repost, and every comment was a bot reposting the comments from the last time it was posted. And in the middle of that, there was like a single human commenting on it, not realizing he was intruding on a karma farming circle jerk filled with bots.
I’ll try embedding the image, if it’s too compressed to read I can upload it somewhere else:
i think that dead internet is another form of enshitification that’s more common on platforms that are backed by significant financing. eg reddit, facebook, bluesky, etc.
anecdotally: your experience gets richer on social media if you avoid platforms that describe itself as “general interest” or with investors behind it since both have an interest in trying to attract as many people as possible rather than letting people’s interest organically lead them to your platform; lemmy was a great example of this before the reddit enshitification.
