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Sam Altman\u2019s post on September 4, 2025<\/p>\nThe bots have taken over. They control communications, businesses, and even warfare. Humanity is left watching as its own creation slips the leash. Okay, none of this is true (yet), but doomsayers and sceptics of artificial intelligence (AI) warn that it could be.<\/p>\n
The idea gained traction in 2021 with the rise of the \u201cdead internet theory,\u201d which claims that since 2016, most online activity is driven not by humans but by bots and automatically generated content. The theory has found a second wind after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman brought it up earlier this month. In a post on X, he wrote: \u201ci never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now (sic).\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Sam Altman\u2019s post on September 4, 2025<\/p>\n
He may not be wrong. According to cybersecurity firm Imperva\u2019s 2025 Bad Bot Report, more than half of all web traffic (51 per cent) is now automated. So if you are scrolling online, chances are you\u2019re bumping into bots more often than humans.<\/p>\n
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The report blames the surge on the \u201crapid adoption of AI and large language models (LLMs), which have made bot creation more accessible and scalable.\u201d This mirrors the dead internet theory\u2019s central fear: sophisticated bots, indistinguishable from humans, taking over online spaces. AI advocates, however, insist the theory is exaggerated \u2014 plausible, yes, but not quite true.<\/p>\n
What is the dead internet theory?<\/p>\n
An article in The New Atlantis, a journal on science and technology, calls it \u201ca mix between a genuinely held conspiracy theory and a collaborative creepypasta\u201d. For context, creepypastas are internet-age urban legends, designed to spook readers and spread online through forums like 4chan and Reddit.<\/p>\n
The theory itself first surfaced on Agora Road\u2019s Macintosh Caf\u00e9, a forum where a user named IlluminatiPirate posted an article in 2021 titled \u201cDead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake\u201d. It was viewed over three lakh times.<\/p>\n
The article begins with a sombre reflection, \u201cThe Internet feels empty and devoid of people\u201d, but quickly veers into a deep-state conspiracy territory. It alleges a \u201clarge-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate culture and discourse online\u201d by bot armies and paid employees to \u201cfurther the agenda of those they are employed by.\u201d<\/p>\n
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But while parts of it may be conspiratorial, it touched on real issues: how the internet has been \u201chijacked by a powerful few\u201d (antitrust lawsuits<\/strong><\/a> suggest as much) and how bots are shaping conversations and propaganda at a pace humans cannot match.<\/p>\n How real is the dead internet theory?<\/p>\n Today, social media users invoke the theory when complaining about \u201cAI slop\u201d (text churned out by bots) or bot farms flooding online debates. Unlike earlier spam bots, modern ones can mimic personas, reply to posts, and convincingly pass as humans.<\/p>\n In fact, reports claim ChatGPT became one of the first chatbots to pass the Turing Test, designed by mathematician Alan Turing to assess whether a machine can exhibit human intelligence. Experts caution, though, that LLMs are not \u201cintelligent\u201d as they don\u2019t \u201creason\u201d \u2014 they merely predict the next word<\/strong><\/a>. Even so, they can pass for human in casual conversation, which is enough to blur boundaries.<\/p>\n Altman noted another twist: \u201creal people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak\u201d. That means even authentic users now sound bot-like, further fuelling the sense of an \u201cempty\u201d internet.<\/p>\n Story continues below this ad<\/p>\n The signs are everywhere. During the 2023 Republican debate and a Donald Trump<\/a> interview, researchers found over 1,300 bot accounts on X, spamming identical posts within seconds.<\/p>\n On Reddit, communities like r\/AITA and r\/AskReddit complain that AI-generated replies are drowning out genuine voices. In fact, in April this year, Reddit said it was considering legal action against\u00a0 University of Zurich researchers, who deployed AI bots to influence conversation on a popular forum r\/changemyview. The experiment fuelled concerns around the ability of AI to mimic human behaviour online<\/p>\n Research shows Facebook<\/a>\u2019s feed now promotes AI-generated images because they trigger higher engagement. Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, dubbed this phenomenon the \u201czombie internet\u201d, where bots, humans, and accounts \u201cthat were once human but aren\u2019t anymore\u201d mingle but barely connect.<\/p>\n The dead internet theory taps into the already existing anxieties around social media and how easily it can manipulate us. Since the early 2010s, there has been a growing clamour against the misuse of the internet, through bots and mis\/disinformation, to influence public opinion. In 2020, the Oxford Internet Institute reported that misinformation<\/strong> <\/a>was being produced \u201con an industrial scale\u201d, with state actors spending $60 million on firms using bots to amplify political messaging. Meta, too, said it disrupted 20 covert influence operations in 2024, additionally blocking 5.9 lakh requests for AI-generated images of politicians during election season.<\/p>\n The way forward?<\/strong><\/p>\n Story continues below this ad<\/p>\n Experts warn that unless Big Tech is held accountable, the internet could indeed become a ghost town. They recommend stronger regulations: clear labelling of AI-generated content, mandatory identification of bots, and legal protections against deepfakes. Denmark, for instance, has proposed giving citizens copyright over their body, face, and voice to shield against AI misuse.<\/p>\n The urgency is real. Chatbots have been shown to fuel suicidal ideation<\/strong><\/a>, veer into harassment, or mislead users<\/strong> <\/a>outright. Human oversight, transparent reporting, and stricter guardrails are becoming non-negotiable.<\/p>\n Yet lawmakers and regulators are struggling to keep pace with technology. Perhaps, as some suggest, fiction offers guidance. In the 40s, Isaac Asimov imagined a future where robots were indistinguishable from humans \u2014 but bound by three unbreakable laws: never harm humans, always obey humans if it doesn\u2019t break the first rule, and protect their own existence unless it conflicts with the first two.<\/p>\n Maybe that\u2019s the real lesson. The danger isn\u2019t that machines will look and sound like us. It\u2019s that they \u2014 and those who create them \u2014 won\u2019t be bound by the same moral code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bots have taken over. They control communications, businesses, and even warfare. 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