Alive Internet Theory

People say the Internet is dead.

The theory is that since ~2016 the Internet has been mainly bot traffic and AI-generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation.

They say it is a virtual world slowly then all at once overtaken by bots, posting content and crawling data on behalf of corporate actors to influence opinion and harvest data for their AI models.

And yes parts of this are true.

It’s true that AI-generated content is trending to be the majority of what we know as the internet, mainly in the realm of web articles and replies on social media:

And it’s also true that the majority of what we’ve called ‘web traffic’ is programmatic, bots and agents collecting data and performing tasks on behalf of humans.

But the Internet is not DEAD. It has just evolved.

The theory fails to mention that the AI articles are mostly things like FAQs, product descriptions, and documentation (stuff that never required much human touch anyways). Or that there are actually 10x more people writing thoughtful blogs on Substack and corresponding thoughtfully in digital town squares like Discord.

I will concede that yes, my email inbox is more crowded than ever with unwanted spam. And yes one in five posts on my LinkedIn feed are some form of AI slop.

But: you can tell.

We humans have great BS detectors. It’s usually pretty obvious if something is written by AI (and your social credit goes down if ppl can tell you are AI slopping). And if it is good enough to be undetectable then so what?

The point is that in many ways synthetic content has made taste more valuable. Good writing and content stands out more in this world. Real human connection cuts through the noise. And my gut says we are post-peak of AI slop.

Many parts of the internet are more alive than ever. It’s just that now it’s not on your Facebook feed, it’s in Discord chatrooms, Twitch livestreams, and YouTube comment sections:

Peace,
Ramsey