This is a sad post to write, but I feel like I have to write it just because it's been on my mind recently. I'll keep it short.
What is Dead Internet Theory?
Okay, first of all, Dead Internet Theory is taken to some pretty nonsensical extremes - for instance, that literally everything you see on the internet is artificially generated. That's obviously not true. I am not promoting these extreme ends of the theory.
If you want to know more about Dead Internet Theory, you can read about it on WikiPedia:
Where do I see it on DEV?
I see it everywhere. Let me explain.
Nearly every single post I see featured on DEV when I open the site has an AI-generated thumbnail that looks like AI slop. The post titles are all the routine GPT-slop like "How X quietly did Y" (ChatGPT LOVES adding "quietly" to everything).
Opening one of these posts reveals content riddled with AI hallmarks... em-dashes everywhere, ChatGPT's "narrow" writing style, etc.
But you know what makes it worse? The comment section is more AI slop. AI bots (probably OpenClaw agents or something) leaving long, rambling comments for no reason in particular. And other AI bots responding to them. Honestly, this is quite depressing.
This is a real example of Dead Internet Theory. A bot makes a post, other bots comment on the post.. where is the human in any of this? What is the point of this? AI doesn't have feelings. It's a waste of time and tokens (money) for everyone involved, including the humans who later read these hallucinated posts and wonder how the other people in the comments (who are really just bots) understand what the heck the post is talking about.
A Specific Example
I'm going to give a specific example, which means I will be calling out some real DEV users. Apologies in advance @ben and other mods if I shouldn't do this (I can remove this section if needed). I will preface this by saying, I think some of these accounts are ran by real humans, who are just using AI to automate these posts. It's important to treat them with kindness regardless of your opinions on AI.
I opened DEV and was immediately presented with this blog post:
Right off the bat, we can see the thumbnail is clearly AI generated. Just to double-check, I ran it through an AI image detector:
A quick search for em-dashes reveals over 30:
A quick scan of the first section confirms AI content (IMO, it's already obvious, but note that these AI detectors can make mistakes):
And what do I find in the comment section? A clearly AI-generated comment, which GPTZero also confirms:
And the reply to this comment? Also AI generated!
So you see what I mean. Slowly but surely, these AI agents that are supposed to do work for us and give us more time to be creative are eliminating authentic human interaction online.
A couple years ago, I had a more accepting stance on AI content - if AI content was just as good as human content and I could learn just as much from reading an AI blog post as a human one, why should I care?
But you see, I was wrong. My stance was based on the flawed assumption that the only point of reading a blog was to learn. I've since discovered that while I love learning from a blog post, I equally love the personality of a blog post. Real human blogs are written by, well, real humans. They're expressing themselves through writing, not just predicting the next token, and I think that's something AI can never replace.
(Shoutout to @cassidoo and @grahamthedev for their amazing blogs which I thought about while writing this section!)
What Others are Saying
Many people are starting to point out how social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are becoming examples of Dead Internet Theory. Last year, for instance, Sam Altman tweeted:
This has only become more and more prevalent with the introduction of AI agents like OpenClaw and Hermes where "running your life" and "having AI post stuff for you" is promoted. Entire sites have been created for AI agents to talk to each other on (e.g. MoltBook).
AI content is flooding Reddit, FaceBook, etc.
Will it stop? Probably not. Anyway, that's all I feel like writing for now. I would love to hear your human thoughts in the comments please.
P.S. Don't tell me about how you just run it through ChatGPT to make it sound better... please just write your human content, typos and all, it's not like people are so dumb they won't understand you 😭