How a conspiracy slowly becomes reality

The Dead Internet Theory is slowly becoming a reality. Not because of its original conspiracy, but Generative AI makes the internet slowly but steadily a wasteland of synthetic data.

Nowadays about half of all the internet traffic is done by bots, YouTube engineers fear that fake views will soon surpass real ones, Meta is actively using bots on their platforms to increase engagement, Google Search shows a lot of synthetic data in texts and images, LinkedIn is flooded by posts created by Generative AI. The human element is slowly submerged by synthetic junk.

And it is not only Big Tech flooding the Net. Many of its users are enthusiastically joining the band wagon in search for recognition, money, or simply to have a laugh. It’s fast and does not require a lot of thinking.

In the meantime, human creativity and critical thinking get numbed under the pretext that AI actually does the opposite. Creativity becomes Newspeak for prompting AI to come up with something interesting.

The internet does not get more interesting. It becomes sterile. Less human. More of the same, mixed, but still… the same. Yet many proclaim this is the future and nothing can be done about it. It is, however, the inertian excuse.

Today is not the future. Today we make the decisions that will form the future. As Nancy Duarte once said ‘The future isn’t a place we’re going to go. It’s a place you get to create.’ The question is, do you dare to do it through hard work?