Navigating the Dead Internet Theory: AI's Impact on Authenticity

"I saw something on LinkedIn the other day that stopped me mid-scroll. It was a post-clearly AI-generated, you could tell from the cadence, the slightly off phrasing, the generic inspirational tone-and underneath it were dozens of comments. Enthusiastic comments. Supportive comments. And every single one of them was also AI-generated. Bots responding to bots. A whole conversation happening, and not a single human being was involved. But every part of that exchange was designed to look like it came from a real person."

"I found this both tragic and hilarious at the same time. Tragic, because deep inside of me is this wish for interactions to be genuine and authentic. And hilarious, because having lived through the development of automated systems-and having participated in using these systems myself to get what I needed-I realize we're kind of responsible for this. This is what people call the dead internet theory."

A LinkedIn post and dozens of comments were AI-generated, producing a bot-to-bot conversation that appeared to involve real people. The situation combines a longing for genuine interactions with recognition that developers and entrepreneurs routinely use AI tools that create content and data. Those tools can populate networks and produce feedback loops where systems interact with other systems, a phenomenon called the dead internet theory. Distinction exists between intentional machine-to-machine integrations (APIs and system calls) and AI-generated content designed to mimic human voices, which raises concerns about authenticity and ecosystem integrity.

Read at The Bootstrapped Founder