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Dead internet theory

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Dead internet theory is the hypothesis that most of what people see on the internet is created not by people but by bots and generative AI. It has two parts: an observation that can be checked against data, and a conspiracy theory about intent, for which there is no evidence.

The theory appeared in January 2021 as a post on the Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe forum and reached the mainstream media the same year.12 With the arrival of large language models, its observational part began to be measured: according to traffic reports, bots account for more than half of requests to websites, and a noticeable share of new text online is written with the help of AI.

History

  • 05.01.2021A post titled “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake” appears on the Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe forum. The author writes: “The Internet feels empty and devoid of people.” and claims that most supposedly human content is created by AI. According to him, the theory was first put together by him and other anonymous users of imageboards, including Wizardchan. [SPECULATION] The second part of the post, that “the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population”, is not supported by anything.1 ¶ c2ynybgcu
  • 31.08.2021The Atlantic publishes Kaitlyn Tiffany’s article “The ‘Dead-Internet Theory’ Is Wrong but Feels True”, and the theory breaks out beyond the forums.2 ¶ c3tktjkp4
  • 03.09.2025Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, writes on X: “i never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now”.3 ¶ cv4ewkmag

Data

studywhat was measuredresult
Imperva, 15.04.20254web traffic for 2024; the company sells bot protectionautomated traffic is 51%, exceeding human traffic for the first time in ten years; malicious bots are 37% ¶ cy4y8dfw4
Ahrefs, 19.05.20255900,000 new web pages from April 2025; an in-house detector of a company that sells SEO toolsAI text appears on 74.2% of pages; AI only, 2.5%; humans only, 25.8% ¶ cwbfz8e8j
Cloudflare, 29.08.20256how many pages a platform’s crawler loads per visitor it sends to a site; Cloudflare customers’ sites; the company sells AI-crawler blockingJuly 2025: Anthropic, ~38,000 pages per visitor; OpenAI, ~1,100; Google, 5.4; almost 80% of AI-bot crawling is for model training ¶ czcnfd3sw
La Cava, Aiello, Tagarelli, 08.10.2025751 Reddit communities, 2022–2024; preprintmachine-generated text is “marginally present”, but in some communities in some months it reaches 9% ¶ c3mvnm6yv
Graphite, 14.10.20258articles from the Common Crawl archive, 2020–2025; a study by an SEO agencyin 11.2024 AI-written articles outnumbered human-written ones for the first time; since 05.2024 their share has not grown ¶ ckdd2kip7
Imperva, 05.05.20269web traffic for 2025bots are more than 53% of traffic; AI-driven bot attacks grew 12.5-fold ¶ ci4shwu2u
Pew Research Center, 20.08.202610a random sample of 10,000 web pages from July 2026; the Open Pangram detector; a nonprofit research center10% of pages show “significant signs of AI authorship” (written or substantially edited by AI); among pages published after ChatGPT’s release, more than a third ¶ cvamdk79a
[EDITORS’ CONCLUSION]

The data confirms the observational part of the theory, but not in the form in which it is usually retold. More than half of web traffic is bots (Imperva), but these are mostly crawlers and automation, not fake conversation partners; AI crawlers take hundreds or thousands of times more from sites than they send back in readers (Cloudflare). The share of text written with AI is growing, but estimates range from 10% (Pew) to 74% (Ahrefs), depending on the sample, the detector and whether mixed text is counted. In living communities like Reddit there is still little machine-generated text. Caveats: all AI-text shares come from detectors, and five of the seven studies were carried out by companies that sell bot protection or SEO services. ¶ cjefppfm2

Incidents

AI images in the Facebook feed, March 2024 ¶ c4yqihyea

The Stanford Internet Observatory studied 120 Facebook pages, each of which had posted at least 50 AI-generated images. The owners were spammers, scammers and creators chasing reach; some pages had been stolen, some operated in coordinated groups. The Facebook feed showed these images even to people who did not follow the pages. One of them, Jesus as a crab worshipped by other crabs, collected 209,000 reactions and more than 4,000 comments. The work was published as a preprint, without peer review.11

Meta AI characters, January 2025 ¶ ct9pk2492

In late 2024 Meta’s vice president of generative AI Connor Hayes told the Financial Times that AI characters would “over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do”. After that, users found the company’s old AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, for example “Liv”. On 03.01.2025 Meta deleted them. According to the company, it was a 2023 test, the accounts were run by people, and the removal was due to a bug that made it impossible to block the characters.12 ⧗

Secret experiment on Reddit, April 2025 ¶ cthaz89ut

Researchers at the University of Zurich secretly deployed AI bots in the r/changemyview community on Reddit, where members argue and try to change each other’s minds. Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee called the experiment “deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level”, and Reddit sent the researchers formal legal demands. The university told 404 Media that the results would not be published.13 ⧗

Criticism

Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in The Atlantic: “Dead-internet theory is a niche idea because it’s patently ridiculous” and “Obviously, the internet is not a government psyop”. At the same time she acknowledged that, unlike many other online conspiracy theories, “this one has a morsel of truth to it”.2 ¶ c5wbcw2z3

Caroline Busta, founder of the media platform New Models, said in the same article: “Of course a lot of that post is paranoid fantasy”, but the overarching idea seems right to her.2 ¶ c39vgacpn

The best-known figure around the theory, that “as much as 90 % of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026”, comes from a 2022 Europol report on deepfakes, where it is given as an estimate by “experts”. In January 2024 Europol reissued the report and removed the claim about the future share of synthetic content as coming from an inaccurate source.14 ¶ cevy7sk6b

Signals

See also

Social networksChatbotsGenerative AILarge language modelDeepfakes

References

  1. Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake — Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe, 05.01.2021. forum.agoraroad.com ↩ ↩2

  2. The ‘Dead-Internet Theory’ Is Wrong but Feels True — The Atlantic, 31.08.2021. theatlantic.com ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Sam Altman: “i never took the dead internet theory that seriously…” — X, 03.09.2025. x.com ↩

  4. 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report: How AI is Supercharging the Bot Threat — Imperva, 15.04.2025. imperva.com ↩

  5. 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages) — Ahrefs, 19.05.2025. ahrefs.com ↩

  6. The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals — Cloudflare, 29.08.2025. blog.cloudflare.com ↩

  7. L. La Cava, L. M. Aiello, A. Tagarelli. Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit — arXiv, 08.10.2025. arxiv.org ↩

  8. More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans — Graphite, 14.10.2025. graphite.io ↩

  9. The 2026 Bad Bot Report is here — Thales, 05.05.2026. community-cybersec.thalesgroup.com ↩

  10. How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI? — Pew Research Center, 20.08.2026. pewresearch.org ↩

  11. R. DiResta, J. A. Goldstein. How Spammers and Scammers Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth — Stanford Internet Observatory, 03.2024 (preprint). pdf ↩

  12. Meta shuts down AI character accounts on Facebook, Instagram after outcry — NBC News, 03.01.2025. nbcnews.com ⧗ ↩

  13. Reddit Issuing ‘Formal Legal Demands’ Against Researchers Who Conducted Secret AI Experiment on Users — 404 Media, 29.04.2025. 404media.co ⧗ ↩

  14. Facing reality? Law enforcement and the challenge of deepfakes — Europol, 01.2024 (updated version of the 2022 report). europol.europa.eu ↩

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