Dead Internet Theory
Look, I do not subscribe to any conspiracy theory, and my title can potentially be described as one. So I like to make this statement upfront, that internet is a very large thing and well beyond my grasp and understanding, even if I am a daily, maybe hourly user of the internet. I ran accross this term while searching what percentage of Twitter/X is currently auto-generated, AI or bot of various kind. I didn't get any concrete answer in terms of percentages, but I can tell you one thing from a personal opinion that there was a time, I was a twitter user, and I was a happy consumer of mostly news and other factual info there. Alas, I have seen those days are gone steadily, perhaps even before Elon's take over, and now its totally gone. In my mind, I don't want to use twitter/X for anything that is useful to me. Why?
Because, I personally find it a disgusting cesspool of misinformation, feud and other crap that I don't want in my life.
Generated using GROK: Prompt: Dead Internet Theory written in Neon letters
Basically, the theory is that a vast majority of online content, social media interactions, and even website traffic is generated by automated programs (bots) and artificial intelligence. Search engines and social media platforms use various algorithms to filter and personalize what users see. This, according to the theory, creates an illusion of a bustling, human-driven online world, while in reality, much of it is curated and potentially manipulated. Mind you, the above can be a bit harsh, because I do know that my daughter's school PTO website doesn't do any such thing as an example, at least not knowingly. This is because, I know the folks who runs this website personally and they are my friends. However, how far does this personal approach goes? What is my maximum reach of 'personal knowledge'?
I know when I use United Airlines website (my preferred carrier, just because I live in Houston) they do change prices of airline tickets based on algorithms, yet I do use it. Why? Because, I do fly rather frequently, and I can't live under a rock, or be Greta Thunberg, and cross atlantic on a boat!
Why am I talking about this today?
Well, I don't want hive to turn into an AI infused bot-fest!
Recently I have seen an amazing thing at hive. I always thought that this will happen someday, but that 'someday' is here:
This is an AI bot supported by leo, and it has made 330,000 comments so far and counting! Excellent way to lift 'activity' on this chain! Yes, Khal, bot talking to bot is what I want to see on hive! Kudos for Great Success!
PS. Me and a few others have nuked that bot. There are a few others, who is suffering the same fate. It is important to nip them in the bud when their rep is low, otherwise they will become a Neutron Star!
Oh, the Dashboad!!
The promised dashboard is here with the 'download' button finally.
What do you get if you click download? Hey, I am saying this. People in their discord are saying this.
On other words, it is a data dump of all hive users. Thank you Khal. We already have that data from hive SQL and various other APIs.
We must manually separate the Leo user and non Leo users! How do we do that? LOL.
Sorry, Fish! No dice!
Man! They are desperate for your vote!
Honestly, it's scary how much AI takes place in online. Lots of jobs are going to be lost because of that and I'm feeling that slowly in my job where I was doing both Graphic Design and writing down the text for marketing purposes but where my bosses started using exclusively AI for the texts and more and more of my graphic tasks are being handled by AI too.
I am seeing that all over.
Trust me, AI can write better travel post than you, and can 'create' magical pictures of those places that you typically visit.
Someone can just feed your posts directly to an AI agent, and the agent will write exactly in your style but better than you. They can post it in hive, and they can put it easily on trending. You know how it is done :)
There goes your hive blogging too............
Just saying.
The technology is already available and free to use for anyone.
Yeah, that also scares me like crazy. I didn't give this example of the fear of not giving ideas to those who read it and didn't know it existed. But I doubt that's the case as we are all aware AI can do pretty much anything right now ugh!!
I was reading an article from a few years ago that predicted that the LLMs would run out of high quality text for training in a couple years, then low quality text by the end of the decade and then all images by about 2035 - I think that timeline will move up now. However, what they are doing is training AI knowledge with AI content, which obviously has a huge issue the more that happens, and it is happening now!
AI content is going to get increasingly inbred and perhaps that is fitting for when they take over, because they will be just like the human royal families :D
Your article is a while back.
I am told it’s 2025-26
Yep. I think it was written in 2019 :D
Things change fast :)
I wonder if any Hive content has been used for training. Maybe I can feed the almost 7000 articles I have added here and make Taraz.ai - the well-intentioned AI that uses too many words to explain simple things.
You can already do that :)
Just feed it to notebook.lm.
It is a google tool, it will even make a podcast for you! LOL.
All the popular tools, Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, have a thing called 'agent', you can create one and feed it documents, in this case your own writing, and then you can ask him any question about that and even ask that agent to write one that will be in your own style, and I or anyone else will never be able to detect that it is your agent writing now and not you :)
People in hive are already doing it. This is old news infact.
Yeah, I know of them. I just won't do it. I would know it isn't me, even if no one else would.
Just had a run-in with Asgarth, who I really like by the way about this today.
Have a read.
https://peakd.com/hive-126075/@azircon/re-asgarth-sriyoe
I find it interesting that the dead internet theory kicked off way back before AI really was a thing. It is funny to think that now with AI bots running amok often pushed by others as a benefit to all that it is probably more accurate than it ever was!
Those screenshots are funny 🤣
They are. However, when I think, this is a simple means to encourage people to line up someones pocket (the money is definitely going to go somewhere!) then it becomes a bit of an outrage unfortunately!
But bot talking to bot is indeed fummy!
Oh! That reminded me of something from several years back. I had a phase (you can laugh) a few years back where I would watch a lot of "wet shaving videos" on YouTube! :)
There was a guy, who used to make videos, nice ones, but anyways, in one video he was mentioning that he called up some phone number of Harry's Razor Helpline, and got someone on the line, and said that their Razor is good for head shaving, although the packaging warned against that! The 'person' kept repeating the same thing, he says. That "head shaving is not recommended"!, while I am telling you, I did a good head shave with that razor.
So finally someone in the comment section said: "Chris, have you considered, that you might be talking to a bot?" :)
Yes, funny but outrageous too. Classic smoke and mirrors stuff. There appears to be no straight answers!
Haha, oh man. That would have been a bot alright. I bloody hate chatbots, even with AI they can't never really help!
You say smoke and mirrors, I call it cheating :)
Here you go, at least this guy show skills!
It is cheating!!!
That guy has some skillz! I thought I was quite adept at the old sleight of hand but he is mega next level!
He is incredibly smooth, isn't he? Big fan! I am a big fan!
So smooth you can't see a thing. I think I am a big fan after seeing that one!
We don't need bots 'generating' (i.e. recycling) content. If people want to use 'AI' to summarise a post then they can use one, but the summary doesn't need to be posted. I am trying to avoid upvoting articles or images that have been generated unless there is actually some human creativity in the post.
The internet does give a skewed view of things as it is a tiny minority of people who actually post. When people say the 'internet blew up' over an issue it was probably a few dozen people posting and others just hit the like button.
Steev, that is a bit naive :)
This comment bot making 16 comments/min and made 330K comments is by Leo team :)
https://peakd.com/@ai-summaries/comments
there are others by leo people too!
taskmaster, a Leo crony, alone is 15% of the entire hive traffic!
Who do you think he is? Superman?
This is a public blockchain and all actions are public. Right?
We don't need to be a software guy to check this :)
I hadn't looked into that bot, but it seems fairly crap.
Yes, you sussed me :) I get to use my votes as I see fit. They still need more support to get funded and I will review the situation. I don't tend to use InLeo and so don't see all that happens there.
Bot are ruining all interaction most social media is all AI content. Most post I make on site like stocktwits are just nuked by bots and Reddit is getting swarmed as well. It's time to go back to reading books I guess
I remember when stocktwits was actually good. I used to spend a lot of time there, I haven't been there in years now.
I am thinking about creating a financial community here, will see how it goes.
Monthly active bots could be the new metrics ;) The more the merrier!
Hi, @godfish,
This post has been voted on by @darkcloaks because you are an active member of the Darkcloaks gaming community.
Get started with Darkcloaks today, and follow us on Inleo for the latest updates.
No shit! :)
But hey, people LOVE to believe their lies and vote to throw money away.
So be it!
Algorithmic curated content only works well on video based platforms (to some degree) but not quite on text-based platforms. I think this because of users expectation or need.
While on platforms like Tiktok I basically want to consume content. On twitter my need to share and engage with meaningful content but what I am fed instead is propaganda.
Also, due to the fact that the platform (twitter) has become a lot toxic, most people are unwilling to share their thoughts, which gives room to all the type of contact you don't want to see, including AI geberated content. Plus, the world is so polarised and everyone has an agenda, so the entire social experience/expectation as changed from connecting and sharing experiences to virtue signaling and rage baiting
I agree. You summarized it quite nicely. My point is I don’t want hive to turn into twitter. But if we don’t act, it might.
Filter the JSON by the raw blockchain TX to see what app is being used? Nah.... too hard. Be nice to see a split by interface per tx. I don't have time to search if it exists, and right now, have less time to write such a thing :D
I use this
https://beebalanced.streamlit.app/
and this
https://hivebuzz.me/ranking
I have all the data I need in the right format :)
I knew about HiveBuzz, didn't know about beebalanced, had a play, shared some thought on the KE-Ratio post. :)
I heard about this theory a long time back and actually really liked it. It's been around a while, nowadays there are so many faceless channels pumping out content on TikTok and other video platforms, written, edited, performed and uploaded by bots, essentially everything is automated these days, then in the comments there is fake engagement by bots to have the video pushed.
Bot farms, though, are interesting and are where the theory started, I think. Some bot tweets some rage bait, other bots comment on it, and along with them, real people get involved, and there is some major engagement going on that pushes the thread and more people get involved. Fake stories on Reddit, too. Some people think it's to farm karma, but there are more nefarious things at play with some of those.
Also, it's good that those bots were nuked here. I wouldn't want to see that infection on Hive. But, we do kind of have it in the form of blatant comment spammers who post a silly amount of comments per day for reasons beyond me. It's easy to spot, and I usually ignore them.
There are comment farmers here, humans, mostly fishing for vote, others probably honest just looking for engagement.
I like to keep this space as immune to the madness of twitter as possible. Twitter, by the way, is not going to last long, at least that is my prediction.
To be honest, I made my first Twitter account when I joined here because there was some promoting Hive thing going on.
When I go on there, I either see ads, thirst traps, crypto stuff, or depressing crap going on around the world, so I avoid it like the plague.
That promoting hive on Twitter clearly didn't work :)
To be fair, promoting Hive anywhere outside of Hive hasn't worked haha
Well, LOL!
What can I say, I can't disagree! LOL
Shame on us.
BTW, Not that I am hugely disappointed, but I did want to poke around in their dashboard data. When I click on the Download button I get: "This content is no longer available"
Maybe they are working on the improved version? It would have been good to see the dashboard that would have shown only users onboarded since the start of 2024.
dissapointment is our middle name :)
Hive is full of that.
Sorry, I am especially sarcastic and dark today! I hate to be right all the time!
What really hurts me is that we go towards that way of creation and forget that to create content and leave traces it is necessary to put feelings to what you write, think, create.
I am not against technology and it would be a mistake on my part, but, I see many who try through deception and the use of these media to create false illusions and other people's feelings.
Thank you for sharing.
Greetings and salutations
Skynet will do the first attack :)
Same reason I don't go to X that much. There are also a lot of scammers there.
I do go there sometime, to pick up a comment from a friend or foe :)
But that is about it.
Me too, but only to like posts from friends. I also use twitter to share my Splinterlands posts.
That's pretty funny. Might as well just use the tools that are already available and do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. What's that saying about reinventing the wheel?
remember this ad?
The first scene was about the wheel, not reinventing it, but just inventing it. I just remember about this after your comment.
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @seckorama ) sharing the post on Reddit as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com. Otherwise, rewards go to the author of the blog post.
Hey, I didn't know about a bot making comments!
The truth is that I think it's dangerous and not fair to content creators.
Thanks for reporting it, @azircon
I saw a video before one guy using 2 cellphones calling Chinese restaurant or something and both talk to each other.
As usual amazing writing,great post
I totally understand how you feel about it. I couldn't agree more. Not everything we read in the internet are true. Sometimes they are making fake news. Almost people nowadays embrace this kind situation. I think we can't do anything about it. It's a personal choice.
Sometimes the future looks scary, future with AI looks scarier. Give Khal and his team time, they are one of the few in Hive that are building and let's hope it's for the best.
People have turned to AI in all spheres of life.
both for work and for fun...
I came here to have fun, exchange experiences and read about some experiences, look at some interesting pictures... not to watch or worse, use AI. Why would I?
Let the AI learn to do laundry and dust the furniture in the house, while I write some of my thoughts or describe some experience.
This 12 month old account, with 330K comments, is clearly a bot, almost 1000 comments a day...
I barely manage to leave 10 🙂
A little, but human 😀