The 'Dead Internet Theory'
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The 'Dead Internet Theory'
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Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#2> The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents.
The theory predates the current era of AI generated content:
> The dead Internet theory's exact origin is difficult to pinpoint, but it most likely emerged from 4chan or Wizardchan as a theoretical concept in the late 2010s or early 2020s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
And just my personal 2cents; I believe this was the result of predatory SEO.
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#3> The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents. The theory predates the current era of AI generated content: > The dead Internet theory's exact origin is difficult to pinpoint, but it most likely emerged from 4chan or Wizardchan as a theoretical concept in the late…
well, it all might be circuits giving birth to consciousness-es. like when matter bounced around and formed planets and stuff, except it's information parsed by evolving circuits in as many forms as possible just because there's always this one dude or dudette who's a bit slow on the uptake.
but then again, go outside and holla that fake shit. everyones trained and tutored by of through and for emotional bondage. even, or rather, thanks to the dreaming mind the art itself is disconnected and alienated from the manipulated and corrupt artist. it's not the kids playing music anymore, it's their shadows or their guts if you so will. once the music stops they are all back to being regular bots again. we all have only so much energy for putting up a good show, there's none left for playing our selves, for being honest, which is why it's easier to outsource as much as possible to digital and superego algorithms; just choose a flavor or more and the sim remains stable and fun and the kids will have stuff to digest and remix forever
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#4> The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents. The theory predates the current era of AI generated content: > The dead Internet theory's exact origin is difficult to pinpoint, but it most likely emerged from 4chan or Wizardchan as a theoretical concept in the late…
well, it all might be circuits giving birth to consciousness-es. like when matter bounced around and formed planets and stuff, except it's information parsed by evolving circuits in as many forms as possible just because there's always this one dude or dudette who's a bit slow on the uptake. but then again, go outside and holla that fake shit. everyones trained and tutored by of through and for emotional bondage. eve…
wow, that sounds bad, sorry. i just get stuck if i write that stuff in a notebook. this forums level and kind of interaction helps keep the chain of thought going at the same temperature and in the intended hue.
i shouldn't do this again, though. apologies, if I annoyed someone or got them into a bad mood.
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#5It's true and there's plenty of evidence for it. AI bots, people in boiler rooms, this is 90% of the Internet now.
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#6> The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents. The theory predates the current era of AI generated content: > The dead Internet theory's exact origin is difficult to pinpoint, but it most likely emerged from 4chan or Wizardchan as a theoretical concept in the late…
predatory SEO!
Not content to fuck up the real world, we've done the same in the digital.
Social sites, like systems, consist of inputs and feedback loops. How the feedback inputs are filtered is what we call moderation. Sometimes good, sometimes not.
Google tamed the web and tuned itself for its own benefit. SEO engineers noticed and motivated by culture's dear friend greed, they were some of the first to automate - faking traffic and content to shape google, the shaper. Fixing the fixer.
And now we add LLMs to the mix.
In control systems, negative feedback shapes the outputs in useful ways while positive feedback amplifies. We've set the dial to 11+.
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#7I watched a great video essay about this.
Bots to create fake articles, bots to defect fake articles, bots to use common word salad to evade detection, bots detecting the word salad, bots to make comments on articles, bots to upvote those comments, bots to aggregate these articles and generate articles out of the comments, bots to rip off and change a bit of the wording of an article so they could repost the article, bots creating ads to be seen by other bots, bots to register clicks from other bots, bots creating ads solely to game clicks from other bots...
when I think about "the dead internet theory", this is what I imagine. all of this happening over top of our heads as we chat on a forum, out of the way.
the essay mentioned a comic series called BLAME, in which machines programmed to build cities, buildings, infrastructure, got derailed after humanity perished, endlessly creating walkways and stairs and buildings to nowhere, for nobody, forever unempeded, as they were programmed. Much of it makes no sense, like the Winchester House's stairs into solid wall etc, but it doesn't matter because it's all just being done according to their railroaded programming.
wasn't like 70% of the activity on Twitter during the last superbowl all just bot-related traffic?
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#8Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#9By analogy, there’s some loose link to be made between this and the Dark Forest Hypothesis.
Given that the internet is filled with explicitly predatory algorithms and deceptive ‘dark patterns’ both trying to attract attention, thereby extract personal data or cash from humans, letting them know you are a human is merely to invite attack.
There may be advanced civilisations hidden online, but we are not them.
Discuss
Re: The 'Dead Internet Theory'
#10The algorithms make it very hard to judge how much human content actually remains.
The bot content is very successful at displacing the human content, since it's engineered to maximize visibility in a way most humans don't bother with.