AI is overhyped & the Internet is dead.
I love The Dead Internet Theory, the idea that most of the activity online, 60%-ish including social media comments, accounts, and entire articles are generated by bots. I hate that I am addicted to Tik Tok, Instagram, and googling random stuff. I wasn’t familiar with this theory, and now that I’ve read up on it, I feel differently when I get sucked into the apps.
“The Dead Internet Theory (DIT) suggests that much of today’s internet, particularly social media, is dominated by non-human activity, AI-generated content, and corporate agendas, leading to a decline in authentic human interaction” (Muzumdar, P., et. al.).
The comments sections used to make me sick, I’d read them like a self-hating prophecy, now I’ve decided all comments are fake unless they’re nice. I feel gross about how addictive these apps are. As a nanny, I feel like a terrible example because, while I try to monitor the kids’ screen time, I struggle to monitor my own.
Being an influencer in 2025 is what being an Oscar-winning movie star was in 2005, but I think an influencer is somehow worse. You’re famous but not really, so maybe you have anonymity at a restaurant, but you aren’t really known for anything. And you don’t really get your work seen, you just have a phone full of real or not real strangers pushing buttons and typing, mostly, mean stuff. If I saw a Reddit thread about how much people liked to “snark” on me I’d pass away.
I made one, 3-minute video yesterday, since I’m studying AI, I tried making a video to explain it, partially to help myself. It wasn’t fun; I don’t see how that’s “content creation.” I guess “content” is just a loaded word now. I can’t imagine trying to be an influencer, it’s not fun, guys!!!!!!! But actually.
Maybe the internet is about to get so AI-slop, bot-heavy that we’ll all return to the sea. I need an adult to monitor my screentime. I not only need to touch grass, I need to clutch grass, I need to roll down a hill like a squirrel in a car tire with fistfuls of grass in each squirrel hand. Hand? Paw? Do they have paws?
If you are scared of AI though, here is something that made me feel better once I finally understood it (Thank you to IBM’s YouTube channel for our many months together).
AI is not new, it’s a subset of computer science. Generative AI is new; that’s the AI you keep hearing about. Chatbots like Chat GPT or the creepy AI art like Dall-E and Midjourney.
So when your boss manically shouts that you all “need to be using AI”, they likely mean generative AI tools.
These new forms of AI also use a lot of water, the chips that power the machines to make all of this happen sit at data centers, big tech companies i.e. Meta, TikTok, & Open AI, have data centers all over the world. These machines get hot from all this work, but not Paris Hilton hot, more like “96-private-jets-going-to-a-wedding-for-an-oligarch-in-a-sinking-city-hot.”
AI isn’t new, it’s not taking over (it already did!) these are all AI…
Netflix recommendations
Roomba vacuums
Emails filtering to spam
Unlocking your phone with your face
What’s “new” is (mostly) Generative AI, it can’t meet or surpass human intelligence (yet) & let’s hope Zuckerberg and his broligarchy team of tech pirates don’t get there anytime soon.
Hope that made 1 person feel less confused.