"They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there's you and maybe a few others, but you can't tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks." - Robert Mariani, The Dead Internet to Come.
Bots are everywhere on the Internet. I’m sure you’ve noticed them selling concert tickets in your WhatsApp chats, popping up on customer support websites, replying to your tweets (X posts now?) with ostensibly human-like parlance. They don’t seem to be going anywhere, and that’s a problem.
Take the social media platform X. The number of botted accounts on there has exploded since the October 2022 buyout by Elon Musk, despite his promises to eliminate them. And they’re smarter than ever now. No more hashtag spamming and non sequiturs. They’re contributing to legitimate conversations, (not always with good intentions), garnering interactions and attention from humans and other bots alike. ChatGPT was its printing press.
One social media platform wouldn’t be a big issue. But generative AI (genAI) results on Pinterest too? Fake true crime documentaries on YouTube? Strange image search results? Then even sports journalism?
Doctor Who fans reading this blog may recall the second episode of its 2005 reboot, in which the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler visit the Earth minutes before it is due to be engulfed by the red giant Sun. On their space station, the “Last Human” attempts to pull off an insurance scam by arresting the ship with robotic spiders, hidden in gifts offered by her servient robots, the Adherents of the Repeated Meme. (By the way, the “Last Human” is really a 2000-year-old skin graft and was granted that name based on being the last born of two full humans, around 5 billion years into the future.)
Mapped literally, we already see internet entertainment such as memes heading this direction. Of course, let people enjoy things…
…but I do find it interesting how easy it is for meta-posting and “brainrot” to spread as far as mainstream culture. The jokes are easy to make – in fact, the joke is the fact that it’s a joke, by some tautology. Give a model a database of viral tweets, common tropes, some Druski and LeBron gifs, and you’ll probably be looking at a 100k-like TikTok post in a few hours. A personal favourite of mine has got to be @multimedia2012. Whether or not that account steal posts from X and Facebook then packages it up a genAI video of that scenario, its TikToks are unfortunately quite funny.
Back to the bigger picture. I see that episode’s parallels in how actual human users employ genAI. Churning out such content further pollutes the sea of information noise that is the modern Internet, making it substantially more difficult to fish out unique content. And to reiterate the common point, you are damaging creative integrity, especially if used where the human touch is expected.
The honest, carefree Internet as we knew it is dead. Yet, we, out of ignorance or insanity, have replaced the robots that killed it by creating freakish cyborg-zombies from what we once despised.
As the phrase goes, the only thing worse than flogging a dead horse is betting on one. There doesn’t seem to be anyone left to stop us going all-in.
Further reading​
R. Mariani, “The Dead Internet to Come,” The New Atlantis, vol. 73, no. 73, pp. 34–42, 2023, available: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-dead-internet-to-come.
A. Hern, “TechScape: On the internet, where does the line between person end and bot begin?,” The Guardian, Apr. 30, 2024. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/30/techscape-artificial-intelligence-bots-dead-internet-theory
This article was amended on 9 March 2025, to correct the reference link to R. Mariana's work.