The Dead Internet Theory. Are We There Yet?
More than half of all web traffic is bots now. The theory saw it coming years ago.
Facebook removed about 3.5 billion fake accounts last year. Billion with a B. That is almost ten million a day. Numbers we can't grasp.
On Deezer, more than half of all new songs uploaded every day are fully AI-generated. Around 90,000 tracks. Daily. Who uses Deezer, by the way...
Numbers like these used to sound like a conspiracy theory. Now they come from transparency reports.
I don't think the internet is dead. Not yet, not really. But it's starting to crumble a bit, isn't it?
That feeling has a name. The Dead Internet Theory.
The theory
It started in 2021, on a forum called Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe. The thread: "Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake." The claim: most of what we see online isn't made by humans anymore, bots create the content, bots click it, and a shadowy group steers the whole thing to manipulate us.
The Atlantic picked it up the same year and filed it, politely, under conspiracy theory.
The shadowy-group part still is one. Nobody is steering this… I hope...
But the other half of the theory, machines making content for machines, stopped being a theory a while ago. Large parts of it are just measurement now.
We notice that as writers too. Writing is done by AI. Reading is increasingly done by AI too. So where are we headed?
The numbers
Imperva, a security company that counts bot traffic for a living, published its report for 2024: automated traffic passed human traffic for the first time.
51 percent of all web traffic is bots. 37 percent is malicious bots.
Music: Spotify deleted 75 million spammy tracks in twelve months. On Deezer, AI uploads went from 10 percent of new tracks in January 2025 to over half today. And in a Deezer and Ipsos survey, 97 percent of listeners couldn't tell AI music from the human kind.
Couldn't tell… is the key here.
Books: researchers tracked 14,419 self-published genre novels on Amazon. One in five contained substantial AI text. Among new entrants into the top-25 bestseller ranks, it was 31 percent by 2026. Not one of these books disclosed it.
The readers still lean human, but how long? The AI books are 20 percent of the catalog but only about 12 percent of the sales.
For now.
Bots liking bots
The theory's darkest scenario, sort of, is weirdly mundane. A bot wishes you a happy birthday. Another bot likes the post and says thanks. Somewhere a dashboard counts two engagements, and no human was involved at any point.
I see the small version of this under my own articles. Polite, well-structured comments, vaguely related to the piece, and clearly written by a machine. I wrote about those comments a while ago.
The feeds probably make it worse. They surface whatever people interact with, and AI slop is strange enough that we stop and stare. Every stare tells the algorithm to show it to more people. And some (or more) of those "people" are bots too.
See the problem...
Model collapse
There's a second loop underneath. AI models train on internet text. The internet fills with AI text. So the models increasingly train on their own output.
Researchers showed in Nature what happens then: the models degrade. The output gets less diverse, more repetitive, more wrong. They call it model collapse.
Nobody knows how far that goes in practice. The labs know about it and filter their training data. But the direction is set: the more the internet fills with synthetic content, the harder it gets to train on... the internet.
There is something almost fair about that.
Human corners
Detection tools won't save us. Nope. They are easily fooled, or wrong in the first place. Watermarks may help for a while, until they don't.
So the likely future is the reverse: we won't label what's fake. We'll verify what's real.
I've said before that it doesn't matter if AI wrote it. If a story is a good read, it's a good read. I still think that.
But the Dead Internet Theory isn't asking who wrote the story. It's asking whether anyone is reading it afterwards.
People might turn out to want content from other people. If that's true, either the existing platforms find ways to surface verified humans, or new networks appear that do (which is a cool thing to think about).
If not, the split becomes financial too: some pay for human work, the rest scroll whatever the feed pours out.
The Bottom Line
I make a big part of my living on this internet today. Real readers, as far as I can tell. Thank you!
"As far as I can tell" is the new wording, though. Because sometimes I can't tell.
The internet isn't dead. The humans are all still here somewhere, writing, reading, arguing, buying odd stuff. We're just getting harder to find these days. And we're losing on numbers, for sure.
Worth looking for each other, though… don't you think?
If you're not already, follow me on Medium.
