Dead Internet Theory: A.I. Killed the Internet

welcome back we bring you breaking news from open ai's Live event a new version of chat gp4 that's their latest and greatest model this new experience will be available to over a billion users I'm going to be interviewing at open AI have you heard of them open AI huh sounds Vaguely Familiar kidding of course that's incredible Rocky what kind of interview you said that this is a time for soul searching in social media businesses and and you were part of building the largest one feel tremendous guilt it is eroding the core foundations of how people

behave by and between each other my worst fears are that we cause significant we the field the technology the industry cause significant harm to the world I think if this technology goes wrong it can go quite wrong an anomaly on Capitol Hill private Tech CEOs asking for more government regulation It's usually the other way around [Music] if you're old enough to remember a time before the internet you remember just how momentous the establishment of the worldwide web really was within a generation your digital life became more important than your physical one your digital reputation was

all that mattered but then around 8 years ago the internet died at least this is the contention of the so-called dead internet conspiracy theory it sounded crazy at first but I'm a Believer now the killer artificial intelligence most analyses of the Dead internet Theory Trace back to this one threat on the Agora roads Macintosh C fa Forum originally compiled by several Anonymous users in the January of 2021 it's a mishmash of anecdote conspiracy and classically offensive forchan language that claims that the internet died sometime around 2016 its most bombastic claim is that quote the US

government is engaging in an artificial intelligence-powered gaslighting of the entire world population end quote the method AI powered Bots that have subtly subverted and steered culture towards nefarious ends it would be impossible to validate the most paranoid claims in the post but others now seem obviously viscerally true the internet does feel empty now doesn't it dead nothing to see nothing to do the internet may seem gigantic but it's like a hot air balloon nothing inside [Music] this progenitor of a famous conspiracy theory doesn't sound so crazy anymore it was just posted too early if it

was written after the Cambrian explosion of generative AI in our information ecosystem it may have even been celebrated as a great cultural Insight while an Illuminati style Global gaslighting campaign still seems unlikely the evidence that the internet may have slipped out of human control is everywhere simply put most website visitors are not humans in 2016 the security firm imp perva released a report that found that Bots were responsible for over half of all web traffic the report also found that every third visit to any website on the Internet is probably from a malicious attack bot

GitHub says AI helps their programmers write up to 30% of their code the company cybra estimated that before Elon Musk took over between 11 and 133% of Twitter accounts were Bots and were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the content YouTube Engineers coined the term the inversion to describe the looming point at which fake views would surpass real ones Google is currently worried that its world changing search algorithm will drown in the current Title Wave of AI generated content and become far less useful if at all you see examples of these takeovers already happening on

Faceook Facebook where images of a crustacean adjacent Jesus Christ have been going viral and garnering hundreds of millions of engagements the comments on these posts leave little room for hope that the internet can be revived I think the internet was terminally ill before chaii BT was announced and released I I think the biggest watershed moment when you look at this sort of theory of the decaying internet is is the release of algorithmic feeds I think that algorithmic ranking systems dur I driven really set the stage for just endless worthless pieces of content in sort of

just the whole internet to be optimized in the most absurd ways but the internet is not just social media even if it feels that way and the Bots have infiltrated there too you can buy AI generated poetry online you can watch films with silicon screenwriters you can listen a podcast with dead celebrities you can read the news reported by your favorite neural network spawn you can be unsettled by the first music video generated via artificial brain generative AI like chat GPT is the reason why if the Internet isn't dead and devoid of people already it

soon will be a blurry landscape of AI and human interaction as one paper calls it shrimp Jesus is obviously fake other content isn't so obvious fake images routinely fool millions of people and make headlines now manipulated content creates it's what's trending malicious AI Creations Force the hands of platforms and governments alike you can easily create entirely fake subreddits where every post and comment and reply is AI generated you can create an infinite amount of music without an ounce of human creativity this live stream of generative heavy metal music has been playing non-stop since 2019 even

an internet enabled job like Instagram influencing is triv easy to emulate and if any of these recent phenomena are still in The Uncanny Valley for you and you think you can identify them soon you won't be able to very soon if I were to add anything to dead internet Theory it would be that the public release of chat PT specifically was a watershed moment and not a positive one its release and record-breaking adoption both created enormous economic incentive for every knowledge work industry on Earth to create incorporate generative AI into their businesses turbocharging the technology

and allowed anyone with any intention good or bad to create Bottomless Pits of lifeless digital corpses at scale for next to nothing according to Timothy shup of the Copenhagen Institute for future studies quote in the scenario where chat PT gets loose the internet would be completely unrecognizable end quot and in such a scenario shup says 99 to 99.9% of online content might be AI generated by 2025 unfortunately this is the scenario we're living in that's just months from now the internet died not because people can be fooled by manipulated media that's always been true it

died because synthetic media like that created by Sora cha PT do e mid journey and others can emulate human creativity at a scope and scale that is impossible for humans to engage with or Si through after its initial release Chachi PT was creating more synthetic texts for its users than appears in all physical books ever written every 2 weeks we've already prognosticated the tremendous effect on the knowledge work landscape we've already seen an explosion of synthetic media that tar are most vulnerable all of this technology backed by huge economic incentive is only going to get

better and faster and less identifiable it will get to the point where not even your own friends and family will be able to tell the difference between you and your synthetic that's why Scarlett Johansson who famously voiced an AI in the movie Her had to pursue legal action against open AI the developer of chat GPT they used a simulacro of Johansson's voice in their 4.0 model even after she explicitly declined involvement Rocky that's quite a statement piece I I mean you you'll definitely stand out everyone thought it was her no wonder so many of us

have turned off our lights in the dark Forest Internet it's a Wilderness of bots and unsettlingly human text and deep fakes and Bad actors we stay siloed in our discords and slacks and substacks and podcast forums and newsletters Because The Internet Is Not only dead it is dark and full of Terrors what was first conceived as a conspiracy theory by World governments to control the population came true not because DARPA or the CIA deemed it so but because some tech Bros in California recklessly released a self-improving revolutionary universally applicable technology to hundreds of millions of

people without our consent the goal the internet was to connect the world in this sort of beautiful vision of building a more interconnected society which would theoretically be a beautiful and amazing thing and I think where we went wrong is when it started to get Warped by this really hyper capitalist Tech environment that we live in and so you started to see these giant social media companies come and disrupt things now we're in sort of The Natural end point of that where they've pushed so hard into the algorithmic world that everything has to be optimized

to the point that everything's just going to be AI generated garbage basically feeding each other losing the internet to Bots and synthetic media is more consequential than losing the fun of their early web it's an epistemological threat as nah shik writes in deep fakes the coming apocalypse it's an old Russian disinformation tactic to not just flood an information ecosystem with false information but with information generally once there is too much noise in the syst signal people start to tune out they trust media less and less as sorting and sifting through it all requires more and

more cognitive effort they don't engage as much in the Democratic process they turn towards strong men they turn towards conspiracy they turn against expertise and facts and Authority when nothing is true or cannot be judged to be so this is what generative AI has done and it's done it all by itself without any help from the KGB Bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything you want you don't realize it but you are being programmed if it feels like the internet is more than just dead that it's dangerous that's because it

is according to an observatory report from The europool Innovation lab quote today threat actors are using disinformation campaigns and deep fake content to misinform the public about events to influence politics and elections to contribute to fraud and to manipulate shareholders many organizations have now begun to see deep fakes as an even bigger potential risk than identity theft end quote a dead internet makes it easier to harass extort create non-consensual pornography disrupt financial markets Stoke political unrest and more the efforts to regulate the eration and use of generative AI are as could be expected lagging far

behind the adoption and expression of the technology do we need an international agency to deal with this do we need new privacy laws where is the technology that can identify Bots and deep fakes as quickly as they can be generated is AI art real art is synthetic music real music is anyone alive out there think about where we're going to be in 10 years and just how easy will be to generate content at scale um and what sort of systems we build to navigate those pieces of content I just think it's going to be a

completely different internet so I do think that the internet that we probably grew up with like the original version of the web the human version of the web is dead we are in a dangerous spot like how history can be meaningfully split into the time before nuclear weapons and the time time after generative Ai and the death of the internet seems like it will be another historical delineation they are both technologies that instantly changed the world it mattered who had them and who developed them both were tested without public consent both with extreme criticism regulations

for each were slow or toothless both put enormous power in the hands of just a few people both rendered certain previous Technologies obsolete and both have the power to obliterate whole populations whether they be physical or digital generative AI we can do it a lot better generative AI is the nuclear bomb of the information age the internet may not be dead in the way the original conspiracy theory claimed it may not even be dead in the way that I claim here but what seems indisputable is that the internet has changed for the worse it doesn't

feel as fun or as creative or as connecting or as endlessly interesting generative AI has come along with a good enough simulacrum of human intelligence and Poison the Well how we purify it I don't know rapid large-scale government regulation feels heavy-handed but necessary there haven't been many ways historically to fight meaningfully against massive economic incentives like generative AI has I suppose this is just another warning a warning from someone who lives on the internet and can see its headstone from here until next time [Music] [Music]