Is the Internet Dead?

Are Humans in Virtual Zombie Territory Every Time We Post Online?

It’s called the Dead Internet Theory. It’s not really a theory in the scientific sense of the word; it’s more of a conspiracy story or, at best, a vague hypothesis. It has its roots in what is actually happening online. Something we can all see — and have seen and experienced. Simply open Facebook or YouTube anytime to see it. In late 2025, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, posted on Xitter that: “i never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.” He didn’t, of course, take responsibility for any of it.

And it’s not really dead because the zombies (bots and AI) have not fully taken over. Yet. There is still a lot of human-generated content online (you’re reading some right now. But, I wonder, is it on its way to becoming a graveyard where human content is struggling to survive at the fringes while bots and AI spam control the majority of its real estate?

The SpaceNazi Elon Musk’s rightwing swamp-platform, Xitter, cancelled more than 42,000 bot accounts using chatbots in July alone, out of 1.7 million bot accounts it has shut down this year alone. And those didn’t include any of the “Bot accounts that label themselves as bots, post automated weather updates or stock prices, or surface information without pretending to be human…” These are still within Xitter’s allowable accounts policy, and are not always neutral. All those cancellations didn’t make Xitter any less toxic, however: it’s still a rightwing swamp.*

Meta estimates that “around 4-5% of Facebook accounts are fake, which works out to about 120-150 million accounts on a 3 billion user base. Independent research pushes that number higher, with many studies estimating 10-16% of Facebook accounts may be bots or fake, and ad traffic estimates reaching 50-70% bot activity.” (emphasis added) Meta has its own AI, of course, deciding what users get to see, who or what populates their feed, and what ads dominate.

The Guardian reported late in 2025 that “More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds.”
It added, “Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media – and generating about $117m a year, data shows.”

The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.
Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates…
A Guardian analysis this year found that nearly 10% of YouTube’s fastest-growing channels were AI slop, racking up millions of views despite the platform’s efforts to curb “inauthentic content”.

Canadian author Cory Doctorow coined the term Enshittification for what has happened to the internet. Wikipedia tells us it’s also known as “platform decay … a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time.” The Dead Internet Theory is more about takeover than decay, however. It’s the result of tech companies pushing more and more AI-generated content online, encouraging more and more users to create content with their tools, all the time trying to justify their immense investments in their corporate facilities, data centres, and programming efforts by making use of AI so ubiquitous it feels almost mandatory. And yet, doing it all without moral or ethical concerns about the results.

But again I ask: is the internet really dead? Or just being buried alive? Do the data match what we seem to see online every day?

As Magnexis Development Team concludes in its case study, “The Dead Internet Theory is best understood as a mixture of accurate observations and unsupported extrapolations.” But what does that mean to the billions of users who are online every single day, who experience the growing amount of AI-generated content, whose social media feeds are increasingly filled with what has been nicknamed “AI slop”? The report continues:

The strongest evidence supports the idea that automation, AI-generated content, bots, and algorithmic curation now play a far larger role than they did a decade ago. However, there is no credible evidence that most online activity is secretly generated by AI or that human participation has been broadly replaced.
Rather than a “dead” internet, today’s web is more accurately described as an AI-augmented internet—one where human and machine-generated content increasingly coexist, creating new challenges for authenticity, trust, and information quality.

“AI-augmented” doesn’t sound a lot more friendly than just dead. Machine translation, for example, represents another AI usage that seldom gets much attention. But a team of Amazon Web Services researchers found that “roughly 57% of all web-based text has been AI-generated or translated through an AI algorithm.” And then you have AI translating AI. As noted in a Forbes magazine article from 2024:

[W]hen generative AI software relies solely on content produced by genAI, the responses begin to degrade, according to the study published in Nature last month… If human-generated data on the internet is quickly being papered over with AI-generated content and the findings of Shumailov’s study are true, it’s possible that AI is killing itself—and the internet.

How much online content is really created by AI? Is it as much as we imagine or believe we’re seeing? In 2023, some AI experts predicted AI-generated online content could reach as high as 90% of the total by 2025. Clearly, that has not happened. But by May, 2026, a Graphite Research study found “AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans.” It found the share of AI to human-generated content was roughly equal:

ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within the first 12 months, the percentage of primarily AI-generated articles jumped to 36%, and reached 48% by 24 months.
However, since Q1 2025 the percentage of primarily AI-generated articles has plateaued at roughly 50%.

How does the average user, without any specialized tools or training, learn to differentiate human-made from AI-made content? There are a lot of websites that offer tips, advice, and suggestions for identifying it, but… are these sites AI-generated themselves? Even people trained to do so only get it right half the time (emphasis added):

Advances in generative AI technology have made it easier than ever for anyone to manufacture increasingly realistic synthetic media (colloquially known as deepfakes) at faster speeds, larger scales, and with more customization than ever. This in turn has led to synthetic media increasingly being used for harmful purposes, including disinformation campaigns, nonconsensual pornography, financial fraud, child sexual abuse and exploitation, and espionage. As of today, the principal defense to combat deceptive synthetic media depends in large part on the human observer’s perceptual detection capabilities—their ability to visually or auditorily identify AI-generated content when they encounter it. Yet the growing realism of synthetic media impedes this ability, heightening people’s vulnerability to weaponized synthetic content. Moreover, people overestimate how capable they are at identifying synthetic media, further exacerbating the problem.

In July, 2026, Pew Research surveyed 10,000 websites and found that “10% show significant signs of AI authorship.” However, when examining pages published after ChatGPT was released, researchers found “signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages.” Ten percent seems small, but as the report notes, the trend toward using AI content rather than human-made content is growing rapidly.**

The Stacc report compiled data from 50 sources to examine AI’s usage. In a study of 900,000 pages in April 2025, they found “74.2% of newly created web pages contain AI-generated content.” Their blog post shows other significant numbers from these data sources:

• 74.2% of newly created web pages contain AI-generated content. Study of 900,000 pages from April 2025. (Source: Ahrefs, 2025)
• Only 2.5% of new pages are “pure AI” with no human editing. 71.7% are a human-AI mix. (Source: Ahrefs, 2025)
• AI-generated articles surpassed human-written articles in November 2024. 50.3% of new articles are now AI-created. (Source: Graphite, 2024)
• Approximately 57% of all online text has been generated or translated using AI. (Source: eWeek, 2025)
• 71% of social media images are AI-generated. (Source: ArtSmart, 2026)
• ChatGPT users send 2.5 billion prompts every day. (Source: Index.dev, 2026)
• Gartner predicted 90% of all online content could be AI-generated by 2026. (Source: The Living Library / Gartner, 2023)

The Dead Internet Monitor says 7.2% of the internet is dead “AI content consumed by a bot audience — machines performing for machines. Based on 295,010 classified posts and comments, and counting.” Its website says:

The Dead Internet Monitor tracks two distinct phenomena: the creation of AI-generated content (“AI Slop”) and the consumption of content by automated accounts (“AI Slurp”). We sample content from major platforms, classify it using large language models, and analyse author behaviour for bot-like patterns.
Our goal is not perfect accuracy — which remains elusive even for specialised detectors — but consistent, transparent measurement of trends over time.

Popular Mechanics Magazine published an article in 2025 titled, “The Internet Will Be More Dead Than Alive Within 3 Years, Trend Shows.” It noted,

Report after report suggests that human-made content pre-AI is slowly dying due to link rot, and steadily proliferating bot content is taking its place, meaning the internet could be theoretically “dead” by the end of the decade.

Kevin Ashton, in his book The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art (HarperCollins, 2026), explains that generative AI’s large-language models (LLMs) can learn words and patterns, but not meaning. They learn to “predict the next word in a sentence,” but they “often make mistakes or ‘hallucinate’ because they are processing patterns without understanding what they mean; their results reflect the biases and prejudices of both their programmers and their training data.” He adds that, because AI chatbots can appear human-like they fool users into thinking they are sentient. They are, he writes, “useful tools for abusers, bot farms, catfishers, con artists, fraudsters, groomers, harassers, impersonators, scammers, stalkers, and online predators.” Which again feeds into Doctrow’s concept of enshittification.

On Gregoreite.com, the author writes:

Many modern LLM AI’s (ChatGPT and its siblings) have, in layman’s terms, “eaten the internet”. What is meant by this is that a significant portion of the contents of the internet has been cached, scrubbed, parsed, filtered, censored, and weighted, and this resulting “data stream” (generally on the order of mere terabytes, post-processing) has been the “food” (technical term: “training dataset”) that the baby AI’s have used to learn all the intricacies of both our languages, our species, and our planet, our science… indeed, our entire concept of what constitutes “reality.” (it is of note that today’s AIs make no formal distinction between the dueling “realities” of a college-level Physics textboook and the magical universe of Harry Potter).

Is this deliberate? Was the decay intentionally crafted by political actors, corporations, greedy social media platforms, AI corporations, and advertisers? Is AI itself directing the takeover? Or is it all just a byproduct of an emerging technology? I tend to lean toward the latter, but assume a large dose of predatory capitalism and lack of any ethical corporate policy are included (Trump’s promise that these AI corporations will self-regulate morally is as empty as every other promise he has ever made). Still, I sense the former notion drifts too much into unfounded conspiracy tales and can end up in the same anti-intellectual miasma with anti-vaxxer stories, creationists, and UFO abductions.

Of course, there are people, countries, and political parties who deliberately weaponize the internet for their own agenda and use AI and bots to make it happen. MAGA, Trump, Russia, and many other rightwing influencers and parties are among them. We cannot shrug off this danger. And, of course, advertisers use AI to grab our attention and use bots to flog us with their unrelenting ads, emails, and text messages.

A dead internet does not seem to serve the basic purpose of most corporations involved: to make money. But is that still the goal of someone who is already a billionaire like the people who run these companies? Maybe they’ve gone past greed for riches to greed for power and control. Or maybe it was always there, and their money has finally allowed them to realize it.

And, lest we forget, most if not all of the billionaire techbros behind the AI companies subscribe to the neo-fascist “Dark Enlightenment” ideology, which despises democracy and intends to enslave the rest of us as indentured workers or slaves in feudal enclaves like in the Mad Max movies. So maybe it is deliberate for some (most?) of them.***

Wikipedia notes:

Supporters of the full theory claim that social bots were deliberately created to manipulate algorithms and enhance search results to influence consumers. Some proponents also accuse government agencies of using bots to shape public perception and opinions.

While I am aware that some rightwing governments, parties, associations, and political actors use bots and AI to shape political dialogues and election results against their opponents. i know they try to change any narrative that is negative towards them. However, I don’t believe that most, if any, democracies are using them for that purpose or that they conspire to do so.

My conclusion: No, the internet is not dead, and a long way from it, although the tech companies are continuing to push its use on every platform, and the percentage of synthetic content and its influence will only continue to grow. Human creativity and intellectualism is in danger of being consumed by synthetic and AI-generated content because these tools are so easy and inexpensive to use, but there is little to no moderation for any of it. AI tools can be used creatively and for many positive purposes (and much entertainment), but the threat lies in them being used for disinformation, lies, fakes, political and election interference, non-consensual pornography, hate propaganda, and MAGA-meme slop.

Notes:

* Rightwing and MAGA political bots continue to be a serious threat to democracy on Xitter and, Given Musk’s extreme rightwing views, are not likely to be shut down any time soon because they continue to promote his caustic, racist, and extremist political views. From Wikipedia:

Concerns about political Twitter bots include the promulgation of malicious content, increased polarization, and the spreading of fake news…. In 2023, Israel signed millions of dollars in contracts with Trump linked firms to use bots and influence AI, launching a pro Israel propaganda campaign targeting millions of Christian church goers in order to win back Republican support for Israel.

** ChatGPT was released online on Nov. 30, 2022, a date often identified as the date of the death of the internet, or at least of the human-content internet.

As Gregoreite.com adds:

…as we entered the 21st century, hundreds of millions of eyeballs started to migrate from the old media: radio and television and magazines — to the new media: all forms of content on the internet, on the computer monitor, on the laptop screen, and today, on your tablet and smartphone screens and in your earbuds.
And as that audience shifted, the money followed. SEO — “search engine optimization” — became a massive industry. Ads were placed on content, and content was designed — specifically — to play to the algorithm that was Google search. Whoever made it to the top of the search results rank, got the most eyeballs. And whoever got the most eyeballs, made the most money.
This resulted in a massive transformation of media: from authentic news that people read to be entertained and informed, into “clickbait” — mindless articles whose only purpose was 1) to be listed first on the search results for any given keyword, and 2) to have a title and summary that was catchy enough to make a significant percentage of people viewing it to reflexively click on it… thus triggering the pageview, the content, the hypertargeted ad machine, the money flow.

*** Perhaps I am a trifle too idealistic about capitalist corporate goals: maybe the Dark Enlightenment techbros intend to turn the internet into a slop-filled entertainment and meme factory meant to, as Neil Postman wrote, “amuse ourselves to death” with, dumbing down the populace with virtual bread and circuses. Curtis Yarvin’s and Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment is essentially an outgrowth of Ayn Rand’s libertarian ideology of selfishness. And what is more selfish than a billionaire?
There are many good articles explaining DE and why the tech billionaires who think they should run the world. CBC has one titled “The movement to ditch democracy in favour of start-up cities run by CEOs.” The Cascade Institute has another: “Anti-democratic ‘Dark Enlightenment’ ideas have spread from Silicon Valley to Washington.” It notes, “in a recent essay, Mr. Yarvin called for voters to elect a president who would assume complete executive authority (essentially monarchical power) and dismantle the American government system. Mr. Yarvin has also written that democracies should be replaced with ‘for-profit sovereign corporations.'” A more recent article from Sage Journals explains how this ideology began in and has expanded to the UK.

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