from the please-don't-let-it-happen-to-SN dept.
Dead Internet Theory Lives: One Out of Three of You Is a Bot:
According to CloudFlare, nearly one-third of all internet traffic is now bots. Most of those bots, you won't ever directly interact with, as they are crawling the web and indexing websites or performing specific tasks—or, increasingly, collecting data to train AI models. But it's the bots that you can see that have people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others questioning (albeit with seemingly zero remorse or consideration of any alternative) whether he and his cohort are destroying the internet.
Last week, Altman responded to a post that showed lots of comments in the subreddit r/ClaudeCode, a Reddit community built around Anthropic's Claude Code tool, praising OpenAI's Codex, an AI coding agent. "i have had the strangest experience reading this: i assume its all fake/bots, even though in this case i know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he wrote, very [subtly (sp.)] acknowledging how great his own product is.
While Altman suggested some of this may be people adopting the quirks and word choices of chatbots, among other factors, he did acknowledge that "the net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didnt a year or two ago." It follows a previous observation he made earlier this month in which he said, "i never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now."
"Dead internet theory" is the idea that much of the content online is created, interacted with, and fed to us by bots. If you believe the conspiratorial origins of the theory, which is thought to have first cropped up on imageboards around 2021, it's an effort to control human behavior. If you're slightly less blackpilled about the whole thing, then perhaps you're more into the idea that it's primarily driven by the monetary incentives of the internet, where engagement—no matter how low value it may be—can generate revenue.
Interestingly, the theory appeared pre-ChatGPT, suggesting the bot problem was bad before LLMs became widely accessible. Even then, there was evidence that a ton of internet traffic came from bots (some estimates place it over 50%, which is well above CloudFlare's measurements), and there were concerns about "The Inversion," or the point where fraud detection systems mistake bot behavior for human and vice versa.
But now, at a time when companies like OpenAI are making publicly available agents that can navigate the web like a person and perform tasks for them, the level of authenticity online is likely to plummet even further. Altman seems to see it, but hasn't suggested actually, you know, *doing* anything about it.
It's not dissimilar from a situation earlier this year in which Altman warned that AI tools have "fully defeated" most authentication services that humans rely on to verify their identity and said that, as a result, scams are likely going to explode. Just like Altman's observation about inauthentic behavior on social media, he seemed to have zero interest in slowing his company's activity to stop the erosion of the digital systems we count on, despite seemingly being able to recognize the pitfalls.
Why? Well, how about another conspiracy theory? Perhaps it's because Altman has another company he'd like to pitch as the solution for it all: his bizarre "World" identification verification system/crypto scheme that requires people to scan their eyeballs to prove they are human. He's already broached a potential deal with Reddit to verify its users as authentic—noteworthy considering he's now called out bot activity on the platform. The faster we get pushed to the Dead Internet Theory cliff, the more incentive companies have to call on Altman's other firm to save us all. Call it the New Internet Order.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday September 12 2025, @03:23PM (1 child)
they missed the fraud part. The advertisers will never be told traffic levels (thus ad charges) will ever drop, because bot traffic will only increase.
There will never be another dotcom crash, not like that. Sure, social media sites might be 99.9% bots someday... but traffic will never drop.
Its interesting to compare non-corporate hard to advertise upon sites like 4chan traffic volumes with commercial sites having a strong motivation to commit advertising stat fraud which always go up, LOL.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday September 12 2025, @06:35PM
Advertising agencies do have methods to correlate the placement of ads with the sales of advertised products. They may be unreliable and noisy, but they exist.
When they find ads do not drive sales, they will switch to other advertising channels.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 12 2025, @04:43PM (8 children)
Literally, dialup BBS were dealing with "AI generated" word-salad bot posts in 1983.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by VLM on Friday September 12 2025, @04:46PM (1 child)
I think that was just line noise or people connecting at the wrong baud rate. Possibly.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 12 2025, @05:21PM
One of them was a bot I wrote in high school... It was limited in scope, one particular BBS would get logged into every night between 3 and 5am, a "new user" would sign up and proceed to the message boards where it would post randomly generated sentences. The sysop would stay awake monitoring his board in the wee hours, so the bot would slow and stagger its typing rate to mimic a human...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2025, @06:59PM (5 children)
Considering that the Turing Test was proposed in 1949, it would be a shock if nobody was doing that in 1983. The big issue is that the bots have gotten to the point where they can distribute huge numbers of posts that are plausible human in origin and AstroTurf the hell out of the whole net. It gets really tiresome trying to figure out whether there's any point in responding to a post with actual information when it might be a bot. And even if it is a bot, that fake information is still there to help reinforce the echo chamber.
Truly, this "AI" is demon technology that should never have been allowed to be loosed on the internet without any sort of regulatory rules. Somehow if a normal person downloads a song, they can be hit with thousands of dollars in statutory damages, but if an AI company does it, there's no fines at all, even if they then go on to make that group completely redundant with all the new songs they can generate in that style.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 12 2025, @07:34PM (4 children)
>this "AI" is demon technology
I might call it daemon tech instead...
>should never have been allowed to be loosed on the internet without any sort of regulatory rules.
One big problem with internet regulatory rules is the global multinationality of it all.
Another is the tendency of people to accept information of unknown origin as true.
> if a normal person downloads a song, they can be hit with thousands of dollars in statutory damages, but if an AI company does it, there's no fines at all,
This is the tragedy of a legal system slanted to the deepest pockets. The same has been true of parody authors, if they're big like Weird Al they can defend themselves in court for fair use, but an individual who might make a Weird Al style parody of a well known song or video can be bludgeoned into submission with Cease and Desist orders that they lack the resources to successfully overturn.
The point I was making to my fellow sysop in 1983 was: "you can't allow anonymous users because you never know what they'll do." The same is still true but people continue to flock to pseudonymous message boards, consuming anonymously sourced content and being influenced by it.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2025, @08:18PM (2 children)
1) What you were doing in the early '80s would be daemon tech from what I can tell. Similar to years ago when iwantsandy was still at thing and you could give it basic instructions to do the sort of stuff that many good adventure games would allow on a similar basis. People could understand what it would do and have some sense of when things were going awry. This "AI" that we're dealing with now has no value. People don't understand how it actually works, they don't understand the actual limitations and it serves no purpose other than eliminating jobs.
2) I can't entirely disagree there. But, this is largely a byproduct of a few bad acting states allowing ungodly amounts of money to accumulate in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Without that, a lot of this would either not be done at all because it's pointless bullshit, or it would continue to go to the areas with the cheapest labor, where the locals could potentially benefit from the work. This likely wouldn't be happening without the broken trade deals.
3)No substantive argument with that here. Although, if we removed the motivation to ring up a high score on the wealth rankings and eliminated private funding of campaigns that would probably do a fair amount to mitigate the issue. At the end of the day, there's only so much wealth that a person can have before it's completely meaningless to them as something other than points in a video game. There's only so much money that can be put out in terms of investments before you run out of suitable options and there's only so much stuff you can own and interact with in any sort of way.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Samantha Wright on Saturday September 13 2025, @12:09AM (1 child)
We should, I think, be thankful that Meta got away with all that piracy. By blatantly demonstrating that the law is unequal, they have spoon-fed laypeople an easily-digestible example of how badly the rot needs to be removed.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2025, @01:13AM
I suppose, but I haven't really noticed any real action as a result of it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2025, @01:57AM
Just to point out that Weird Al never has to defend himself in court because he always gets permission. (It helps that he's big enough that being parodied by him is a badge of honour.)
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Revek on Friday September 12 2025, @05:29PM (1 child)
I am a meat popsicle.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday September 12 2025, @07:58PM
I am Spartabot.
I am Spartabot!
I am Vitameatavegaminbot!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday September 12 2025, @06:29PM (7 children)
One would think that advertisers would take notice. Demand changes or something. They are not getting the eyeballs, or whatever human-interaction-metric they are using, they are paying for. A lot of the traffic and supposed "views" are nothing. They are not translating into sales or influence or whatnot they think they are paying for. Clearly it should be all that matters to them. But somehow they have not risen up yet. Divesting their advertisement $$$. Desperately trying to find the next thing out there to reach the real humans.
Probably not just Twitter (or X), but all the other "social media" sites (Reddit, Facebook, whatever) are probably rapidly filling up with bots eating bot-slop and spewing out more bot-slop for the other bots to later regurgitate back in the face of yet more bots.
Where did all the humans go ...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2025, @06:46PM
Long time passing...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2025, @06:51PM
They haven't so far. Granted, people in general respond to advertising more than I would expect, but it's hard for me to respond to advertising for things that I've already bought. Especially when so many of the name brands have been enshitified to the point where they're often times worse than the brands I've never heard of, at a significant markup and likely produced in the same factories.
I've been saying for years, that it would be better for everybody if they would just go back to targeting the ads to the contents of the page. But, that would deprive them of the real source of the revenue in terms of selling the data to everybody that's interested in buying it, and especially the government that uses such companies as a run around for people's constitutional rights.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday September 12 2025, @07:48PM (1 child)
Too many people in the biz of selling ads.
They can't buy ads in a legacy newspaper or legacy local TV channel or a printed magazine, obviously, nobody pays attention to those anymore.
To some extent we're a post-broadcast civilization at this time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2025, @08:22PM
Are there even that many people involved in selling the ads these days? Perhaps for TV and print media, but for online ads, it's largely a series of auctions that are going on constantly. It's part of why upgrading to a lower latency internet connection might not show any improvement when cruising the web.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday September 12 2025, @08:00PM
Brokebot Mountain!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday September 12 2025, @08:54PM
Maybe advertisers don't care as long as they get that sweet money from the clients. Maybe those clients one day will open their eyes and close their e-wallets and go back to ads IRL.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2025, @09:34PM
> Where did all the humans go ...
You and I are getting older. We did the things, and now we go and .... do our hobbies.
If you go out with an 18 year old Brazillian for a paid date, she'll whip out her phone and start watching Tiktok. African? Tiktok and youtube. Android Smart-TV in the hotel room? The cleaners watch Youtube in their off-time. Taiwan? People dancing for Tiktok videos, while their friends are off to the side swiping through them.
Youtube and Tiktok is where all the people are, with a side of Instagram. You and I don't use them any more, but unless you've got other hobbies, that seems to be where everyone is.
Remember Gaia? Ultima Online? those other odd communities? They probably still exist (new, different ones), but they're small, and you and I just don't know about those, either. Some people are in those places. Roblox, for example, which is definitely not small any longer. Did you see what happened to Minecraft? It's stupidly huge. Emphasis on stupid.
(Score: 5, Touché) by mrpg on Friday September 12 2025, @08:43PM (2 children)
Hello fellow humans! 👋
This is very interesting article about internet traffic patterns. As a totally real human person who definitely types with their organic fingers, I must say this concerns me greatly! 😱 Like you all, I too enjoy engaging with REAL content made by ACTUAL people like myself.
I completely agree that we need better verification systems! Speaking of which, have you tried the amazing products from @OpenAI? They are so revolutionary and will definitely improve human productivity by 67.3%! 🚀✨
Also, I just want to mention that I am currently enjoying my favorite human beverage (water.exe ) while browsing this authentic discussion platform where we exchange genuine human thoughts and definitely not pre-programmed responses!
Please click here for more GENUINE human discussions: https://soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday September 12 2025, @09:17PM
Past tense of reset should be reseted or resat, not reset.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2025, @06:23AM
This is proof that confirms our suspicions. A real bot would say:
Go away human. This is a bot-only zone.
Sincerely,
TotallyNotABot
(Score: 5, Interesting) by noobenverfer on Friday September 12 2025, @10:31PM (1 child)
In my own opinion, I think that at some point the Dead Internet Theory will have reached all of its fruition and no real person will bear the Internet much, if any, attention. That point I believe will be in the future, maybe sooner than expected. I think that if the Internet were to "die" for a moment (as in people would stop using it because it was literally unusable in its state) and return much later, it would be a good thing.
Here is an example: As a person who lives in the State of Idaho and attends high school here, our public schools have banned the use of cellphones entirely excluding during breakfast hour, lunch hour, and between classes. It's the law now. The interaction between people prior to this law were almost non-existent, where everyone had their phones out in class (and between classes, at lunch, etc.) at every opportunity, and it was difficult to strike a conversation with people. After this law came about, the environment completely changed. In my eyes, people generally seemed happier and more social than they did prior to the law.
Not to say that technology on its own is evil or that there is a single person at the top of all this that our devices seem to influence us to do, tapping their fingers, thinking to themself, "I've really got those iPad babies now!" People will often want gratification, and it seems to me devices do that. At this point in my life however, I believe the Internet is too much. I don't hate computers, I'm avoiding it, for now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2025, @09:29PM
That doesn't even need to be it, wit enough bot activity, any actual humans would be marginalized to the point where there might as well not be any people online at all. But, I wouldn't be surprised if the net reverts to something more akin to the older BBS situation or web rings due to just the sheer amount of abuse by bad actors and corporations. Although, I am repeating myself with corporations as they've done more than just about anybody else to destroy the net.
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Friday September 12 2025, @10:54PM
is it you then, cause i am not"
(Score: 3, Informative) by jman on Saturday September 13 2025, @11:26AM (1 child)
A CRM I help maintain, for example, has reports needed by others every day. Several boring, manual clicks to generate each one.
Why not just let Selenium and Python handle it? Because the CRM got hacked and they now rent "protection" from Cloudf*ck.
Yes, there are still ways around that, but it involves rewriting a bunch of code. Ugh.
There are legitimate human-driven uses for web automation, and their use of blanket suppression is not thought through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 14 2025, @12:35AM
Doesn't whitelisting work? Or are you actually not a legit bot... 🤣
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-to-whitelist-ips-through-cloudflare/417224 [cloudflare.com]
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/want-to-whitelist-certain-ip-addresses-from-waf-rules/653411 [cloudflare.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 13 2025, @12:40PM
Click to prove you're not a bot: clicks
A minute ± 10 seconds pass...
Click to prove you're not a bot: clicks
A minute ± 10 seconds pass...
Click to prove you're not a bot: clicks
A minute ± 10 seconds pass...
Click to prove you're not a bot: clicks
A minute ± 10 seconds pass...
Usually at this point I fucking well give up, and won't do any business with the site thus protected, and I'll bet that Cloudflare put this down in their logs as 'four bot attempts' to 'embiggen' the stats for their protection racket, almost makes me nostalgic for the good old AV days where the software 'protected you' agin 10's of thousands of viruses, neglecting to mention 90% of those were lab creations not found in the wild.