Dead Internet Theory

The dead internet theory is so fascinating to me. A lot of you guys asked me to comment on this. If you're unfamiliar with what the dead internet theory is, it's the idea that most like content users and online traffic is generated by bots or AI, whatever you want to call it. And this idea was first brought to light in like 2020 around that time. But the theory is that it really started in like 2010 to 2015, somewhere in that range. And so for this video, I actually looked up some statistics because there are a lot of people that are much more smarter and well-versed in this stuff than me. And I just wanted to sort of talk about it and give my perspective as somebody who is a content creator who has yeah, I guess a decent sized audience cuz I think I have a little bit of a different perspective seeing how people have interacted with me. So, there's this one guy, his name is I'm going to botch this name. His name is Vadam Caravouyek. I think I botched that name, but he is the CEO and founder of Webscraft. And what he did is he's like a web developer. And he did an entire study to basically try to find the dead internet theory. He calls it DIT theory. And he did a deep dive into these various statistics. And I'm going to share some of this with you guys, and it's actually crazy. So, since 2016, the web has been steadily flooded with bots and AI content, slowly crowding out real humans. Of course, we know this. This is a scary statistic right here. 51% of traffic is bots. Over 50% of new articles are AI generated. And Sam Alman, that is the CEO of OpenAI Chad GBT, admitted to a massive wave of LLM accounts on X. Now, when you hear that 51% number, to me, that seems crazy. 51% of all internet traffic would be bots. That seems it it definitely seems possible, but I think it's kind of like a sh I'm getting a little bit of a shock factor when I read that statistic. And this has been steadily increasing. So, apparently in 2022 it was 47%, 2023 it was uh 49%, and now it's over 51%. And you might be thinking, well, that's not like a crazy um rate that it's increased by. Well, here's the thing. AI is going to reach a point. They're they're saying the the estimation right now is somewhere in between a thousand days. So, like 2 to 3 years, give or take, before like a lot of the experts are suggesting that AI will get to a point where it will have I think it's referred to as recursive learning or whatever where it teaches itself. Once AI teaches itself, that's when it's over because it will have exponential growth in terms of like what it's capable of because it won't be bound to human input or like humans doing anything, right? And so you might be looking at 50% even though that is already a very scary statistic. The the idea that when you go online 50% of the stuff that you're looking at is is a bot is like almost hard to believe to be honest with you. What? Well, it's not hard to believe, but it's like once again, it's just shocking. I feel like I'm getting monotonous, but anyways, if you consider every improvement that is likely to happen with AI, which is the most funded, you have to understand there there's literally a law that the government, the United States government put in place where you can't really put any restrictions on AI because we're basically trying to beat China with this for like the next 10 years. You can't do any restrictions. And so they're just going to and this is like the most invested in market in all of America right now. Well, maybe not the most invested in, but it's like one of the most highly invested in markets. So we're spending billions, potentially trillions of dollars into the AI market. So in my head, I'm like, yeah, they're they're really flooding into it. But here's what I'm thinking about that's crazy. Humans have a very limited access. The general public has very limited access to the actual AI that's out there. What do I mean? The elites, the people that are in charge of everything society, the ones that would be utilizing these bots for their gain, they have access to technology that we we don't even understand. The government always has like more advanced technology than what's going to be available to the general public. And so, the reason that I say that is because AI has gotten so good to where sometimes it's actually hard to tell if something is real or not. However, you can still kind of like if you like actually think about it, you more or less can figure out if something's made out of AI. But if we're already that far, imagine how far like the stuff is behind closed doors that the that we don't have access to. And the reason the dead internet theory is scary is because basically all these bots, it it like begs the question, what would the bots or these like fake users, what would be the intention behind them? What's the goal? Why do why do we even have them in the first place? Well, the the reason is because algorithms and content and noise on social media is exactly what shapes 99.9% of people's ideologies or thought processes. I'm guilty of this too. I'm not even saying I'm above this. I think we if you're watching this video and you're still watching this video, 100% you are guilty of this too. And a lot of it happens subconsciously where you're looking at stuff on your feed and you're so convinced that that whatever you're seeing is true and it starts to form a belief pattern even if you're not consciously aware that you're doing it. But when you scroll what you consume becomes what you believe in or who you are. Right? So if a government is trying to essentially or the elites, whatever you want to call it, if they're trying to oppress people and they're trying to control them, more specifically, they're going to do it by means of controlling the algorithms. Like it seems so too basic to be true, but that truly is. Like people are like, "Oh yeah, they they changed the curriculum in schools." And sure that's true, but what do you actually think has a greater influence on the mind of children? Social media or school? I would I think it's social media and I think that it's only going to get worse and worse as time goes on. And so yeah, why would they not try to control all of these things? This begs the question, what would be like what percentage of these bots are bad bots versus normal or good bots? So this guy also looked into this and he said 37% of all traffic is malicious bots. So that's it. It it it's not just like leaving a hate comment and trying to start controversy. It's it's stuff like spam or fake engagement or scrapping. And then 14% are what he calls the good bots, which he refers to in his article as Google crawlers. So this is scary. Social media is also heavily artificial. I mean, we already know this, but up to 64% of accounts on X or formerly known as Twitter may be bots. And this is what's crazy. 10% of accounts on Instagram are fake. Influencers with one plus million followers on average have 23% fake audience. So that would be 230,000 followers if you have a million followers that are like not actually real people. Now this is where my perspective as being a content creator comes in. So, currently when I'm recording this, by the way, it is April of 2026 cuz who knows, maybe people will look at this years later. At the time, let me show you. Can you see this, bro? So, at the time, I don't know if you can see that or not. I have 432,000 followers on Instagram. I'm not saying that to brag at all. I just want to say cuz like I've I like see more engagement than an average person would know. I get a bunch of DMs. My analysis of my DMs, I believe that 30 to 40% of my DMs are not real people. The reason I say that is because they are there are accounts that have no followers. They either have no profile picture at all or like a like a botlike profile picture. It's not a real person. It's like some random image online. And then they leave like very like anti-intellectual responses and and I'm not or like DMs. I'm not even talking about hate necessarily. Like obviously I get a bunch of hate, but like people would just say like the most botlights botlike stuff to me and I'm like there's no way this is a real person. The reason it's scary is cuz think about older people or even like younger people that are like born into this. They're much more susceptible to be victims to this stuff, to being scammed or whatever or just to believing whatever somebody tells them because they didn't they weren't able to like grow up having the discernment like learning the discernment otherwise. Old people like they didn't grow up with this and so they get so old and then technology is so new they don't know how to it's so new to them. With us, I'm 22 years old. I feel like I grew up in like the prime stages of the be the of the beginning of the internet where it's like I've seen how things started and then where things are now and sort of that progression and that progression has get has allowed me to learn and then have discernment on like okay what's real what's not stuff like that. children are just going to be thrown straight into the pit. Like, they're just going to go straight in with the sharks because the second that they're like five, they have an iPad and it's just and it's just giving them the most easily digestible stuff so they don't have to use their brain muscles to think or anything like that. So, this is scary long term. I don't even think that I I don't know. It's hard to say, but once the technology of the bots improves so much, like once you really get to a point where a bot can emulate a real human and figure out how to analyze the way that like real users talk and like cross analyze all these things and then talk like the user themsself, bro, it is it's going to be over with. Like it's like I I don't know how we would be able to tell what's real and what's fake. It's funny because my boys, they're always telling me like, "Yo, you gotta you got to like DM chicks now that you have a following or whatever." Like, they're just teasing me or whatever. But we were talking about it and it's like, if I actually did something like that, I don't even how would I like some AI bots are getting so good where it's like, dude, you could DM somebody and they're not even a real person at all. Like this is like the OG catfish, but now instead of like like obviously like the old catfish stuff, like you kind of have to be I'm not trying to be rude here, but you kind of have to be a little bit dumb to fall for it. But if you can if these AI bots get so good, like you I don't know, like I think average intellectual people are going to start falling for this stuff. And with AI accelerating, so it says on this article, AAI driven traffic is growing much faster than human traffic. Some projections say 90 to 99% of content could be AI generated by 2030. 90 to 99% by 2030. Bro, that's it seems ridiculous because there's so many humans that make content, but when you think about it, what can do more output? One human or one AI bot? one AI bot can post thousands of videos a day and a human might post like 20, you know, and that's on the high end for like an average human. So, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me how that could be. And once again, like once AI improves and we don't know what's real and what's fake, it's over. This is why I've been telling people this. If you ever want to make a personal brand online, you have to do this within the next like 3 years before AGI comes out. Average, what is it? Artificial general intelligence. I think that that's what that stands for. But you have to do it sooner versus later because people are not gonna it's going to be it might be an impossible barrier to entry to where the only like people that have personal brands are the people that like built a name for themselves and image before AI got good because how are people going to know what's real and what's fake? So yeah, it's going to be very hard. Do I believe the AI internet or the dead internet theory is real? I mean yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the these are like statistics that are just insane. Listen to this. Around 52% of new online articles are AI generated. That was in 2025. I think that number's already gone up. Some analysis suggests 70% of new pages contain AI content. That's a little bit vague cuz what really is pages? And here's another thing I was thinking about. Charlie D'Amelio, if she posts a video, it gets like millions and millions of views. Is that held in in equal light in terms of traffic as one random comment from a bot because they're both like one action, like one post and one comment, or does the views like does that play into it? I don't even know. But yeah, it's weird. If you go into certain people's comment sections, you will just see like you guys probably know exactly what I'm talking about where it's like fire emoji, heart, like a very quick real like literally just saying the like typing the word real and it's like you go down the entire comment section and it's very very short responses and there's no substance to anything anybody's saying. It's like emojis. That stuff is all fake. There's no way that is real. There are viral posts online that some way feel like empty or they're like manufactured because I I don't I don't know how to describe it. It's like you you can just tell because the the engagement is not real. There are so many accounts with with a million followers or more that have like some of the worst engagement you've ever seen. I'm talking like like a few thousand views a video and they have a million followers and they have like no actual community. Like no one actually cares. Like this is a real thing. 50 Okay, not all bots are bad. Search engines, customer service, automation tools, but 51% of traffic does not equal 51% of users. Bots just act way more frequently than humans. Okay, so this is that's interesting. It's not that 51% of users are bots. It's that 51% of traffic are bots. So, it could really be like 1% are bots, but they just spam a lot more than humans. That's interesting. Yeah. And as far as the theory, it's only getting more relevant as time goes on. I think it's kind of inevitable. know, I don't think it's a question of whether or not the dead internet theory is real, but it's just when will it become like everyone knows it's it's a reality, but when will it be applied on a grand scale? At what point is the majority of the internet? Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan's podcast. I saw a clip of this recently and he said that he thinks that in 2028 or like in in a few years from now or whatever he said he thinks the way phones are going to work is it's just going to be one giant AI interface where it's not like you don't have apps like apps is not a thing like everything is going to be integrated into one giant software or like I don't even know what you call it like yeah user interface like I guess he he referred to in the in the clip And what scares me about that is you don't even understand once AI gets so good, if we can get the the data centers and and the energy to support them, people are going going to be living in curated AI worlds that are like hyper specific to them. So I could have my own AI world, but that was automated for me in real time. And so it's completely different than anything anyone else has experienced. So, a a close friend of mine, he really loves, you know, those like VR headsets that you put on. And he was telling me if you guys have ever seen the the movie Ready Player 1, me and him are like fascinated with that movie and the idea that maybe in 10 years from now that could be some type of reality. Maybe not to that extent, but something like that. And what really got me interested was there are already games that are using this AI where it learns in real time. What do I mean by that? If you're in a game, let's say you're fighting a boss, you're going to do you're going to develop certain habits to fight a boss. Now, the games are AI, like AI is running the the user uh the the NPCs within the game. And so, what they do is they learn from what you're doing and they change the coding in real time. But if you can do that, think about it like this. I was telling my friend, imagine a story game where you're in a VR headset and in this VR headset you are you have like you're your own person whatever and you start to go on task or journeys whatever the the actual storyline that you're following is but what happens is AI the game never ends because what AI does is it continuously writes new code in real time based off of the actions that you're doing so that you always have something to do. It never ends. Like, let's use a very easy example. Let's say you're just in the Hogwarts world, the Harry Potter world, and you're like a student. Like, you can have AI generate in real time like all these these problems that you have to find solutions to and like your own storyline, but it's not like the game is just like one code and you download that like like regular video games are now. You don't just download the code and then you can only stay within the confines of what the code allows you to or the game allows you to. No, AI will code in real time. So, you can basically do anything you want and then just create a real world. Once this happens, we're cooked as a society because even someone like me, if I'm really bored, bro, I'm just going to go on my VR headset and just like have a blast with some of these games. I was talking to one of my friends and he was like, "Oh, I don't think I'll ever fall for that. Like I don't think I I I I'd much rather just live in real life. But bro, no one like fully understands the level of dopamine that this will give you. It will be so addicting. It will be so tempting to just go in your VR headset one random night as opposed to like trying to to build a business or like go through the gritty hard work of like building something in your real life. The temptation will be so great. And the average human has such low agency, especially in America, in the UK, such low agency that it's hard to imagine that we could get the average person to like steer away from this and not use it. So yeah, I do I think we're just going to have phones and it's just going to be a AI interface and everything is going to be curated. And at that point, I mean, the dead internet theory is just like 100% real, right? I don't know what are like I'm actually interested to hear some of your guys' thoughts because a lot of you guys recommended me talk on this topic and I find it fascinating. But yeah, let me know your guys' thoughts and if you want uh different video ideas for the future, also leave that down in the comments. Thank you guys for watching.