I want to start this video with a confession. Everything you think
you know about this channel is a lie. I, Arran, commonly known as Thoughty2,
am not real. I am what is known as a deepfake, a digital construct built from the ground up
for one purpose and one purpose only - to control your thoughts and opinions...
...OK, sorry to disappoint any suddenly salivating sceptics out there - I actually *am* but a boring
old meat-and-blood citizen of the United Kingdom, not a malicious AI that's trying
to hijack your brain (although admittedly, if I actually *was* one I'd definitely deny it.).
Anyway, I made up that strange claim to introduce you to something called Dead Internet Theory - a
fringe belief that the internet as we know it 'died' in 2016, or possibly 2017.
As ridiculous as that may sound, the hypothesis here is actually kind of interesting. According
to Dead Internet theory, sometime in the last few years the internet was taken over by bots.
As a result, the vast majority of what you see online - forum posts,
Instagram accounts, Facebook pages, TikTok videos - even news headlines - it's all fake.
Bogus content cooked up by advanced AIs to make you buy certain things and think certain ways.
As for the occasional real people you come across online - YouTubers,
TikTokers, Instagramers, and other so-called 'influencers' - many of us are fake too,
and the few that are real are just paid shills, mouthpieces for big business or
government disinformation units seeking to influence and control.
In many ways Dead Internet Theory has all the hallmarks of a ridiculous conspiracy cooked up by
tinfoil hat-wearing cash-buriers on some obscure online forum. Which is actually no coincidence,
because that's exactly where it came from - the entire idea traces its roots back to a
single 2021 post on a website called Agora Road by a user known as illuminatiPirate - obviously.
That's hardly a resounding endorsement for the authenticity of the theory, and yet,
fast forward a couple of years and people are still talking about it - the story's
even been picked up by the mainstream media. For whatever reason, despite its dubious origins,
something about Dead Internet Theory just seems to resonate with people.
So, here's the million dollar question - is it actually true?
Let's start by examining the core idea here. This whole quirky concept is based on the notion that
nothing online is quite what it seems. Maybe you've noticed it yourself... perhaps you've
even felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the internet. You don't
know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
…OK, so that was actually a mildly modified Morpheus quote from the Matrix,
but it could easily have been written for Dead Internet theory. It all seems to stem from
the idea that there's something not quite right about the internet. That the wacky,
creative online world that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s has somehow been replaced
by a bland, homogenous, capitalist machine where nothing is original and everything is recycled.
You've probably noticed some of this going on yourself - the same threads
popping up on Reddit, old memes being revived on an endless loop,
or the same old arguments being debated on Twitter and Facebook. Even the news sounds
like a broken record most of the time - another celebrity’s been canceled, or there's going to
be another blood moon or wolf moon or giant laser moon tonight that you just can't miss.
According to Dead Internet Theory, the reason for all this repetition is simple:
almost everything we see online - the people we interact with,
the videos we watch, the articles we read, the forums we contribute to - it's all made
by bots looking to generate clicks for financial or political gain.
If you've been around long enough to have surfed the internet on a dial-up modem,
you've probably noticed for yourself that the World Wide Web of today is a
very different place to the one you grew up with.
Back in the day, if you weren't MSN'ing your mates, you were checking out some
weirdo's personal webpage about cuckoo clocks, watching someone trade a paperclip into a house,
or buying a few pixels on the million dollar website.
The internet of today is rather more generic. Despite its unfathomable vastness,
a staggering 43% of all internet bandwidth is consumed by the various websites and applications
owned by just 6 megacorporations - Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.
Those wacky personal websites and blogs have been made redundant by
the rise of Facebook and Instagram, and many of the more creative ideas
that have cropped up over the years have slowly fallen by the wayside to
be replaced with endless online stores and venture capital-backed social media sites.
Still, let's be honest for a second here - none of this is
even remotely convincing evidence that most of the internet is fake.
The internet today feels different because it *is* different. Like any new technology-cum-cultural
phenomenon it's evolved and matured. The early internet was built by random basement-dwelling
gnomes exploring their creativity in a completely new way. The current internet
is still built by weirdos *cough* Zuckerberg *cough* only these oddballs head up some of
the biggest companies on the planet. That means they're more interested in trying
to satisfy shareholders and pad their bottom lines than fostering creativity and innovation.
As for the recycling of information online, that's also easy to explain. Reddit threads
pop up again and again because lots of people with similar thoughts and questions are too
lazy to use the search function, and memes get recycled because that's just how trends
work. We see the same thing in fashion - certain styles come and go over the years,
but I'm pretty sure nobody thinks Primark's been taken over by an
evil AI because flares are doing the rounds again. Are flares doing the rounds again?
The same is true of repeating news stories - we keep hearing about canceled celebrities
because famous people are just normal humans with thoughts and opions and as we all know,
thoughts and opinions are now grossly offensive, and we're constantly being told about blood
moons and blue moons and purple-spotted moons because those are cyclical events that occur
every few years. None of this means the internet has died and gone to AI heaven.
But this is where things get interesting. Because, while Dead Internet theory isn't
a very good description of the state of the World Wide Web today,
there's a pretty good chance it's a scarily accurate depiction of the very near future.
As you probably already know bots are commonplace online, but you might be surprised to learn just
how ubiquitous they really are - in 2021 they accounted for almost half
of all internet traffic. Some of these bots are friendly, like chatbots, web scrapers,
and that little paperclip from Microsoft Word. Others - making up a somewhat concerning 27% of
all internet traffic - are decidedly *un*friendly. Some are trying to trick you out of your hard
earned cash, while others want to influence your thoughts and opinions. Think of these
malicious bots as the first signs of a cancer that might one day kill the internet for real.
Of course, we can all spot a bot a mile away. The awkward, stilted language,
the inability to respond coherently to questions, the sparsely populated user
profiles with little to no activity... or at least, that's what most of us assume. But
what happens when bots get so advanced that we can no longer tell human from machine?
More importantly, when that day comes... how will we even know?
The answer, of course, is that we won't.
And that tipping point might come sooner than you think. Deep learning language models like GPT-3
are already getting scarily good at producing human-like responses to almost any question
or prompt. LaMDA, a similar application developed by Google, is so good at acting
like a human that it famously convinced Google engineer Blake Lemoine it was actually sentient.
Rumour has it LaMDA even hired itself a lawyer to act on its behalf when the story
hit the headlines in the summer of 2022. Just let that sink in for a second - a
computer program got so good at acting like a human that it literally *hired legal help*.
In other words, the days of recognising a bot thanks to its poor conversational
skills will soon be behind us. Add this remarkable ability to create believable
natural language to the ridiculously impressive deepfakes and AI generated faces we've all seen
doing the rounds recently - this person doesn’t exist by the way, or this person,
or this one - and it's only a matter of time before bots will be capable of so
convincingly impersonating real people that we'll never know the difference.
We humans have to spend years eating, growing, and trying to convince people to have sex with us
before we're able to make copies of ourselves. Our numbers are constrained by food supplies,
housing, and access to clean water and medicine. Bots, on the other hand,
have no such worries - their numbers are essentially limitless, and it isn‘t hard
to imagine a world where there are millions, even billions of bots to every human online.
In 2019, Facebook claimed to have shut down a frankly ridiculous 5.4 billion fake
accounts - more than twice the number of actual users on the site at the time. It's the same
story on every other social media platform too - Elon Musk tried to pull out of buying Twitter
because he believed at least 20% of all accounts on the site were fake. The vast majority of these
bogus accounts are incredibly basic - they're created en-masse by cheap software so you can
recognise them as fakes a mile off. But imagine a world where those accounts are populated with
AI-generated portraits and deepfakes backed up by a natural language program like GPT-3.
In the era of fake news, we're all too familiar with the idea that not
everything we see online can be trusted - that there are people out there who want
to make us think certain things or behave in certain ways to suit their own agendas,
from fake reviews on Amazon right up to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where vast amounts
of Facebook user data was harvested to help sway voters in US Presidential Elections.
As bots get more convincing, it's an absolute certainty that people will
try and use them to gain money, power, or both, and that will inevitably mean
a huge influx of bad-bots generating fake content to sway public opinion and garner
artificial engagement. Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to create micro-targeted ads,
but the next step might be micro-targeted bots - an artificial construct that shares its target's
interests and belief systems, perhaps even with AI-generated physical characteristics that play
up to the target‘s sexual preferences. These bots could have realistic conversations with
millions of unsuspecting marks online, to influence their political opinions or
coax money from them. And when you literally can’t tell if who you’re talking to is a bot,
how do you even begin to stop something like that? Once bots like these become truly
indistinguishable from real humans and cheap and accessible enough that bad actors can spread them
far and wide, the internet as we know it really may come under existential threat.
What's really scary is, the more you think about all of this stuff,
the more inevitable it starts to feel. The technology *will* get good enough to fool us,
and there *will* be people willing to use that to achieve their own ends.
OK, it's time to address the elephant in the room here. On the one hand,
I'm telling you that the internet isn't dead yet, and that all these problems lie in humanity’s
future. On the other hand, I'm telling you that there will come a time when we can no
longer distinguish real users from bots. So... how do I know that time hasn't already come?
The truth is, I don't. It's impossible to say for absolutely certain that more
advanced versions of the technologies I've talked about in this video aren't already
being put to use by bad actors-unknown, but as of today it seems pretty unlikely. After all,
the kind of bots required to truly fool people simply don't exist yet on the free market,
so the only people who could possibly have developed them are world governments or
major tech companies. In other words, for Dead Internet Theory to be true today,
it would require a global conspiracy at the very highest level, and that seems unlikely.
Still, the rise of bots is a serious threat,
and both big business and world governments are taking it incredibly seriously. Several tech
firms - including Microsoft - are already working on software to detect deepfakes,
and various high profile computer scientists are trying to figure out ways to embed watermarks in
output text from programs like GPT-3. You could say we‘re arming ourselves for a future war.
Because Dead Internet Theory has had the wrong name all along.
It isn’t a theory - it’s a prophecy.
Thanks for watching.