Dead Internet theory
A fringe hypothesis (from online culture, circa 2021) that most visible web content and engagement is already bots, spam, or AI-generated, not authentic human activity.
The Dead Internet theory claims that the “live” internet is largely synthetic: automated posts (sometimes via AI agents), coordinated inauthentic behavior, and, more recently, LLM-written text and images drown out genuine conversation.
It is not an established research consensus; it mixes real problems (bot farms, SEO spam, engagement bait) with unfalsifiable exaggeration. Still, it is a useful shorthand in AI discourse for worries about synthetic media, platform manipulation, and how hard it is to tell human from machine output online (cf. Turing test). Not to be confused with the technological singularity.