Brief thoughts on the "dead internet" theory
I don't have much to say here. The Dead Internet Theory (DIT) has been getting more popular lately, and the initial summary from the Wikipedia page discusses this well enough:
The dead Internet theory[a] is a concept that asserts that the Internet consists primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. Originally conceived as a conspiracy theory alleging that the phenomenon is a coordinated effort to control the population and reduce genuine human interaction, the concept is also employed colloquially to describe the impacts of generative AI and emphasize only the core observations without speculating on the driving forces.
It is difficult to imagine that most people actually believe the DIT. For sure, the internet is filled with bots, but even at this late stage it's difficult to imagine that DIT can be taken literally; there is such a wide variety of content out there, and many bots have no real method to contact you. I have absolutely no way of conjuring real numbers here, but let's say for the sake of the argument that 20% of the time you think you're talking to someone on reddit, facebook, instagram, etc, you're actually talking to a bot. I would actually suspect that 20% is still higher than reality in most cases. (a lot of the time the "bots" are just low-paid scammers from third world countries) But regardless, let's pretend that 20% is true. I believe that would have an enormous outsized effect on trust. Imagine if you got into an accident 20% of the time you drove your car. Or 20% of the time, your spouse lied to you. That last one would be incredibly insidious. A "normal" liar wouldn't lie even close to 20% of the time. Think about the contents of normal everyday speech. "I made you coffee this morning," or "can you remember to take out the trash," or "let's watch TV." Even a fairly evil or manipulative person wouldn't attempt to stash lies into 20% the banal everyday conversations they have. They would wait selectively, and lie about issues of great importance. (eg, "Don't worry about him, he's just a friend" and that sort of thing.) I think when someone is identified as a liar -- if you could actually measure and validate all their speech -- they might actually be lying well under 1% of the time. But of course, that 1% is devastating, and its relative rarity is no consolation at all. Lying less than 1% of the time can break up a family, or worse.
Another example I think is counterfeit crap on Amazon. It's a big problem these days, but I still bet that it falls way below the arbitrary 20% threshold I invoked. But even if less than 5% of the stuff you buy from Amazon is counterfeit garbage, I think that too looms heavy in people's minds. A 5% chance that your toothpaste has industrial chemicals in it, or that your vitamins are inert, or that your telescoping ladder will fail catastrophically when you're climbing on it -- these are chances that people don't want to take, and the fact that everything works out well 95% is little consolation. (that telescoping ladder example actually happened to me, and it was the start of my lack of trust for Amazon.)
It's probably obvious where I'm going with this. I don't think we need to have a very high threshold for totally-fake bot-driven behavior for it to poison individual trust. Even if bots are only pulling the strings 5% of the time, that could be enough to turn most people off. So, I find it hard to believe that people literally believe the dead internet theory as presented. ie, I find it hard to believe that most believers in this theory actually think that most of the content on the web is bots. Instead, I think they're expressing and emotional, or metaphorical truth. One that would translate to "the 5% uncertainty about whether or not I'm talking to a bot looms large in my mind, and I don't even want to bother with the potential deception.