Bringing this discussion up because the last post and a Forbes article from last year came up simultaneously in the past 24 hours. The Forbes article here: https://archive.is/MC2pV says that in 2024 human internet traffic only accounted for 50.4% of the total, and based on the rate of growth it’s safe to assume it’s now less than half versus bots and this isn’t even including real people who just copy paste chat gpt scripts. This is also the basis of the dead internet theory where your interactions aren’t real anymore, they’re with bots trying to shift the Overton Window.
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I don't think dead internet theory is as advanced on reddit as I thought. The upvoting and a lot of the 1-sentence posts have to be heavily botted, but knowing the characteristics of AI writing, comment chains are mostly real people. Reddit is likely a skeleton crew of leftists going back and forth with each other as they unknowingly float on a sea of bots.
Twitter likes for certain lib posts are boosted as well. But overall, I don't think AI is capable enough for the strong form of dead internet theory where you could be inadvertently arguing with a program.
You think that but I've seen people post screencaps (that I looked up) of identical threads where all the comments are the same, all the replies are the same, but the users are different and the posts are years apart. Reddit was already a crapshoot of recycled garbage back in 2012, let alone today.
Or how about during COVID where all those Facebook accounts with MD or RN in the owner's name were posting the exact same "they're dying in the halls at my employer" messages?
There are bogus accounts churning out meaningless copy/paste content for years just waiting to be activated to transmit their controller's message in situations like that
That was Indians, not AIs. They also did a ton of quality control for games back in the day.