Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• First surfacing in 2021, the “dead internet theory” is the idea that the future internet will be largely driven by autonomous bots rather than real-world humans, creating an endless content factory driven by the engagement of solely digital entities.
• Although first inspired by the rise of algorithmic ranking systems (which are themselves autonomous), the arrival of large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made the problem even worse.
• Report after report suggests that human-made content pre-AI is slowly dying due to link rot, and steadily proliferating bot content is taking its place, meaning the internet could be theoretically “dead” by the end of the decade.