The dead Internet theory is A conspiracy with prophetic tones that suggests that the Internet is dominated by AI models and other autonomous machines since 2016. According to this theory, the vast majority of the publications and profiles we see are only bots. In fact, we barely interact with humans: all we see is an illusion maintained by machines, almost like in the movie Matrix.
Obviously, it is a solipsist idea, basically that there is only what we are aware of. And, now, it has become a joke, although some do not rule it out. Which makes it so, Like every conspiracy theory, it is based on a real pinch: The growing anxiety for how false and superficial that the world network has become. And the undeniable avalanche of AI models that occupy much of the web. So much that we have already reached the moment in which, more than half of the Internet traffic, they are bots.
That said, Sam Altman, Creator of the most popular chatbot in the world with his company Openaihe affirms that he begins to worry that the “dead Internet theory” is becoming a reality.
“I never took the dead Internet theory so seriously – Altman tweeted with his usual style, always in lowercase -, But it seems that now there are many Twitter accounts managed by LLM”(LLMs are the extensive language that drives the technology of AI chatbots).
I Never Took The Dead Internet Theory that Seriously But It Sems Like there are Really A Lot Of Llm-Run Twitter Accounts Now
– Sam Altman (@sama) SEPTEMBER 3, 2025
Obviously, much of the responses to the tweet were joking the statement. Above all When the warning comes from an entrepreneur who runs a company valued in almost half a billion dollars And as a product the most famous chatbot in the world, whose sole purpose is to imitate writing and human personality. Or, what is the same: the dead laughs out of the swallow.
Currently, Chatgpt has become a resource to send and answer mails, automate tasks and even write news. And it is not illogical to think that the emails and their answers can be part of this. An image generated by AI is a more comfortable way to capture your imagination, increasingly influenced by LLM, than a drawing or photography.
The spirit of the theory has been even more reinforced by the experiments (failed, for the moment) of goal to display profiles with AI in Facebook and Instagram that are passed through real people.
Affirm that the internet is dead, because it is governed by chatbots, When it is you who sells the chatbots is of enormous cynicism. To put it with diplomacy.