The Internet in Theory and in Fact

By Gordon Hopkins When is a conspiracy theory not a conspiracy theory? When it is not a conspiracy, or when it is not a theory?Another way of asking this is, was it an accident or was it planned all along.There is one conspiracy theory in particular that has me wondering about this: the dead internet theory.The dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory that proposes most internet content mostly comes from bots and AI (artificial intelligence). That's not the theory part or the conspiracy part. That part is just a fact. The conspiracy part is that this is all quite deliberate.According to Wikipedia, “due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.” Regardless of whether or not the takeover of the internet by AI was deliberately planned for some diabolical plan to manipulate the human race or just the random result of an overused technology that no one seems quite sure how to control, the practical upshot will be the same. Dead internet theory suggests AI will become so sophisticated that it will be impossible to tell the difference between AI and a human online. More importantly, there will be so much AI stuff online that it will drown out any human stuff.In other words, pretty soon posting anything online will be like firing a cap gun during the 1812 Overture.Or is it possible that there a “maximum density” for AI on the internet? AI works by taking something someone else has created and “rewriting” to give the illusion that it has created something new. It is the same way people my age used to “write” essays in school by rewriting articles from encyclopedias and passing them off as our own research. School kids today who have all their work done for them with Wikipedia and AI will never know the ordeal of sitting at a desk writing a term paper with two books open, an encyclopedia and a thesaurus. Anyway, my maximum density theory refers to the point where there is so much AI-generated garbage filling the internet that it also becomes the main ingredient of AI-generated garbage. The result for human users is that every query put to an AI results in the same re-re-re-re-regurgitated gibberish, indistinguishable from every other answer spewed out by every other AI.If that happens, the result will be the same. The internet will be so completely saturated with AI and bots pretending to be people that it will impossible (not almost impossible or practically impossible or just really hard but genuinely impossible) to connect with real people who have real ideas and real thought.So, what will people do then? People may actually have to start talking to one another. Can you imagine a world like that?

Gaylen E. Meyer

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