Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian may have agreed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on ‘dead internet theory’: What is it
Reddit cofounder and investor Alexis Ohanian has said that there is validity to the “dead internet theory”—a conspiracy claiming the online world is being overtaken by bots and automatically generated content. Ohanian’s comments echo similar concerns recently raised by OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman.“You all prove the point that so much of the internet is now just dead—this whole dead internet theory, right? Whether it’s botted, whether it’s quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop. Having proof of life, like live viewers and live content, is really valuable to hold attention,” Ohanian said on the TBPN podcast this week.
Sam Altman’s similar assessment
Ohanian’s comments are in line with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who previously said that he did not believe in it but it seems there are several AI-run accounts on Twitter. Last month, Altman wrote on X: “I never took the dead internet theory that seriously, but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now.”The “dead internet theory” emerged as a conspiracy over the past four years, claiming that algorithms and bots were increasingly taking over the online world and would eventually thwart human activity online, Fortune reports.The theory began as a 2021 post by “IlluminatiPirate” on the Agora Road forum and was later written about in The Atlantic under the headline “Maybe you missed it, but the internet ‘died’ five years ago.”According to data from cybersecurity platform Cloudflare, nearly one-third of all internet traffic has come from bots over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report in July found nearly 50% of internet traffic was coming from nonhuman sources, including 20% from “bad bots” taking part in malicious activities.
Ohanian’s solution: More human platforms
For Ohanian, the solution to mitigating bot power on the internet involves making applications more human-centred.“I think we’ll see a next generation of social media emerge that’s verifiably human because it’s all going down in the group chats now—that is not novel tech. There’s got to be some next iteration of that, because that’s where all of us are getting our, really, best info now,” Ohanian said.
