The Internet Is Dying

You may be familiar with "Dead Internet Theory," which states that "activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents" and that "[m]any of the accounts that engage with such content also appear to be managed by artificial intelligence agents."

I don't know if the Internet actually is dead yet, but it certainly seems to be dying. Facebook is always pushing pages on me when I just want to see what my friends are up to; a lot of those are clearly AI-written prose. But even some of my friends who should know better often share AI-written posts!

image courtesy Stackery

Reddit, however, is even worse. So many subs have, of late, been taken over by bots that post LLM-generated content. The problem I have run into is that many posters don't seem to recognize this—these posts often get a ton of engagement and upvotes. I am pretty good at recognizing it, because of course I read hundred of pages of LLM-generated prose every semester. But a stranger on the Internet only has my word for it. Though one of the things I am coming to learn from all of this is that I think people who are bad at reading don't understand that other people can actually be good at it.

I wouldn't say I am perfect at it, but I am pretty well calibrated. I usually check by using Pangram; Pangram claims to have a false-positive rate below 1%. Of course they're incentivized to say that, but if you poke around on Google Scholar, the trend of independent analyses of Pangram seems to put the false-positive rate below 3%. But even if you link people to the Pangram result, they'll still be all, "But how do you know?" There are some bad LLM detectors out there which have given the good ones a bad rap. (And, in any case, I suspect most of the Ai DeTeCtOrS aRe So UnReLiAbLe people are probably the ones themselves using LLMs to write.)

It's infuriating to me that I have to deal with this on Reddit, because if I want to read crappy LLM-generated prose, I can just do it at work! Reddit is supposedly where I go to relax and have fun. On the other hand, there is a bit of satisfaction I get from getting a post deleted—I am certainly the number one bot hunter on a couple of subs.

I am getting better at making my case, though. The key is often to be able to link to a pattern of behavior—and this is also the key to understand what's going on, because that's probably the question I get the most. What is a bot's incentive to post a heartwarming parenting story on Daddit or a broadly worded book recommendation request on r/printSF? As the Conversation article I linked to above says, "This creates a vicious cycle of artificial engagement, one that has no clear agenda and no longer involves humans at all." That article discusses propaganda, but there are other reasons at play when it comes to the Dead Internet.

At least when it comes to Reddit, it's about slipping in product recommendations. Take this user, for example. Aside from all being LLM-generated the posts are pretty innocuous, but read every single one of them, and a pattern begins to emerge:

• A post in r/PostConcussion is supposedly about memory issues but links to an online concussion test they took.
• A post in r/eldercare is about their parent getting scammed by AI, and includes a link to a for-profit service that helps people get their money back. 
• A post in r/Entrepreneurs is supposedly about getting recommendations on how to fight fake reviews, and links to one specific service that will help. 
• A post in r/PaintByNumbers asks if other posters have painted places they want to go to, but slips in a mention of a specific kit from a specific company. 
• A post in r/family supposedly asks for advice about telling her sister she could have bought her engagement ring for $6,000 less online, and makes sure to mention the site. 

Note that of these five, three include a link, though two do not. 

(These bots make it tricky by hiding their posting history, but you can usually find the posts via Google, or the very helpful Arctic Shift tool. Arctic Shift reveals another one by this poster that got deleted on r/OldHomeRepair, where the poster asks about a quote they got for modernization.)

Obviously links help SEO, but what's up with the nonlinked posts? And some are even critical of the services mentioned, like the one on r/OldHomeRepair?

The answer turns out to be... other LLMs! There's a good 404 Media article on it (here's a link to an archived version, because it's paywalled). Lots of people ask LLMs for product recommendations these days. What's the best place for people to get production recommendations? Well, Reddit, because it is of course a compilation of real human experiences! Reddit posts get scraped and searched by LLMs and absorbed into their training data. So if you ask ChatGPT to recommend good paint-by-number kits, it's going to recommend one that lots of people on Reddit mentioned that they liked!

The posts that don't mention products, in between them, are to build up karma—hence heartwarming and/or ragebait stories on Daddit, for example. In fact, I've observed a pattern: often the bots build up comment karma with short, random comments in popular subs, then move on to making posts to farm karma, then move on to product recs.

Of course there's a tragedy-of-the-commons problem here. If everyone markets their products on Reddit via bots, then Reddit will cease to be the repository of real human recommendations that made the bots want to post there to begin with.

Although... I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that real human experience is what people want, anyway. Isn't it just easier to talk to bots? Maybe it's not the Internet that's dying, but the whole human social experience.