Is the Internet dead?

07-29-2025

Have you heard of "the dead Internet theory"? The basic argument is that now, or eventually, most of the content circulating in the Internet is generated by AI or bots, and not only that, but even most of the supposed engagement is also bots just interacting with each other.

There are many aspects to it, and it can be easily misunderstood. But here's just a random thought about it all:

Just because a lot of the content you read or watch in social media is generated using AI LLM's or image generators, does that mean that the Internet is dead?

After all, there is still someone using their creativity to prompt the AI, right?

Well, sometimes. You can just as easily prompt ChatGPT with something like "Write the next viral Twitter thread that will get me all the engagement". And it'll come up with something inflamatory and controversial without you even having to decide on the general topic. You could ask it to write about something more specific, like "write a thread about climate change considering the findings of doctor such and such, defending the argument that it's mostly a scam." It's based on your idea, sure, but the choice of words, the disecting and structuring of the particular points within the subject, are not, not really, as much as you try to prompt engineer the text.

The crafting of ideas matters.

So yeah, maybe, the Internet is dead and all of us here at the small web are basically just the post-mortem knee jerking of the cadaver.