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Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman have warned on social media in recent weeks of the “Dead Internet Theory,” an idea that the internet is dominated by bot activity instead of humans—but experts who once dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory are warning it may actually be legitimate amid the rise of artificial intelligence.
“Is this the time where, yet again, I remind y'all about Dead Internet Theory?” Ohanian said Sunday in a post on X, quoting another post about how many Reddit users were duped by a weekly series of posts about an overweight cat on a weight loss journey named “Pound Cake,” only to find the cat was actually AI generated.
Ohanian has become increasingly vocal about the Dead Internet Theory in recent months, warning in a post on X in June that “it’s not *if* most of what we see online will be AI-generated. It’s that it already is.”
Ohanian said at a Wall Street Journal panel in June he has “long subscribed to the dead internet theory,” acknowledging it was regarded as a conspiracy theory a decade ago but is now “a very real thing” because of the proliferation of bots on social media as well as humans using AI to create and amplify content.
Altman has also warned about the Dead Internet Theory, writing in a post on X in September he “never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.”
51%. That’s the percentage of internet traffic that was generated by bots, as opposed to humans, in 2024, according to cybersecurity company Imperva. The total was the first time in a decade bot activity surpassed that of humans, which the firm attributed to the “rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), which have simplified the creation and scaling of bots for malicious purposes.”
Before the proliferation of large language models, some dismissed the Dead Internet Theory as having little merit, though some experts in recent years have said the theory is more plausible amid the rise of AI. In 2021, Caroline Busta, who founded New Models, a German firm that studies the impact of technology on culture, told The Atlantic—in an article titled “The ‘Dead Internet Theory’ Is Wrong But Feels True”—elements of the Dead Internet Theory are “paranoid fantasy,” though she agreed with the “overarching idea” the internet feels more “empty” than a decade ago. A team of researchers from Swiss universities published a paper last year examining the Dead Internet Theory, stating it “used to be rather speculative” 10 years ago but “with the wake of generative AI, it can now be observed first-hand.” The researchers said internet users now have a harder time differentiating between human-created and AI-generated content, citing the rise of deepfake videos. The researchers added that social media has become “less about connecting humans to other people but about consuming content and getting hooked by deliberately targeted dopamine hits in our brains,” also citing generative AI used by retail companies to sell products. Jake Renzella, a University of New South Wales computer science lecturer, and Vlada Rozova, a University of Melbourne machine learning fellow, published an article describing a “vicious cycle of artificial engagement,” noting AI bots can create artificially generated images that are boosted and reposted by other AI-powered accounts, a cycle that “no longer involves humans at all.” They cited bizarre viral posts like “Shrimp Jesus,” an AI-generated image that went viral on Facebook in 2024. The Guardian technology editor Alex Hern also blamed Elon Musk’s X for exacerbating the phenomenon, noting Musk made it so verified accounts earn more money for higher rates of engagement, stating he “made it profitable to buy a blue checkmark, attach it to a large language model, and set it running wild replying to viral content.”
A team of researchers from the University of Zurich deployed AI-generated bots onto a popular subreddit, r/changemyview, to study whether the bots could successfully cause people to change their minds on contentious topics, but Reddit responded by threatening legal action. The researchers’ work was never published.
The “dead internet theory” had gone viral on forums like Reddit and other websites in the late 2010s and early 2020s. One post on an online forum by a user named IlluminatiPirate, viewed more than 362,000 times and cited by The Atlantic, laid out an elaborate theory about the death of the internet. The user said the internet is “empty and devoid of people,” and that most of the “supposedly human-produced content” is generated by AI. The Atlantic also reported the Dead Internet Theory garnered attention in other online forums, like the subreddit for popular podcaster Joe Rogan, subreddits about paranormal activity and on a forum for fans of Linus Tech Tips, a popular YouTube technology-focused channel.
Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago (The Atlantic)
What to Know About the ‘Dead Internet’ Theory—and Why It’s Spreading (TIME)