Hey, I’ve been pondering the Dead Internet Theory (DIT) lately and how it might impact society. For those unfamiliar, the DIT suggests that the internet has been mostly abandoned and that the content we see today is generated by AI and curated by large corporations. While this theory might sound far-fetched, I’ve noticed a significant portion of the content in my feeds appears to be AI-generated, making it difficult to distinguish between human-generated and AI-generated content.
As someone who was initially excited about the prospect of having an AI assistant, I’m now concerned about the potential for AI to be used to brainwash people and extract money from them. I can’t help but wonder if most people will even notice or care, as they continue to use social media and other online platforms, oblivious to the fact that they’re being gaslighted into believing what the companies that own the AI want them to believe.
With this in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the DIT and how it might affect society. Do you think it’s a real possibility, or is it just a conspiracy theory? How do you think it will impact the way we use the internet, and what can we do to protect ourselves from the potential negative effects of AI-generated content?
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts on this topic!
I think it won’t be abandoned, but we have to find better ways of filtering out AI slop. There are already quite a few search engines with curated networks of personal sites.
Another option is we switch to a different protocol. But internet style networks are too useful for human communication to abandon, I think.