8 ms·

The Dead Internet Theory [video]

53 points by redbell 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago
I always think HN could be improved by having a paragraph summary of each link in addition to the title. (Of course how and who would create such a summary then becomes a problem). Anyway the summary of this link to save anyone clicking through (copied from the youtube summary): The internet is ever changing, but over the past couple of years things have started to change. The proportion of bots in increasing. A theory dubbed “The Dead Internet Theory” that states that most of the internet is in fact AI bots. These bots have been unleashed to control the populous and rake in profits. But is it true? And if so, how much of it is true?
- adrian_mrd 3y ago
  HN-GPT? /s
- gsatic 3y ago
  It is true. UN has a report on it - https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_feb.pdf https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_... The only small correction would be AI is not required. What was required to overwhelm everything is Cost of Broadcast dropping to 0. Spammers and scammers can mass bombard billions 24*7 cause there is no big cost per message sent. The cost is borne by the receiver to wade through the ever growing sewage placed in front of them. As a result less than 0.5% of content produced is consumed as mentioned in the report. Its probably similar to HN but HN is not going to measure it or inform you about it.
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    You need a web of trust, not a web of advertisement and anonymous spam. Just as in real life, there needs to be the possibility to reliably identify yourself easily to others and establish trusted channels of communication. Not just in a P2P manner, but in the sense of a town meeting. Your attention is worth real money, it is billable working hours. Anonymous actors with ill intent stealing it is a crime without prosecution. That should change.
    - gsatic 3y ago
      You could say HN has a decent web of trust, but it doesn't solve the info overload problem. Think of how many links are not being clicked or read by anyone. HN can show us the number everyday. If they say for every 100 links submitted only 1 is getting read. And month by month that 100 is growing to 1000 and 10000 why should/will ppl submit links? HN looks alive. But right now who knows what the number is so the submissions and traffic keep flowing and growing. Scaling it up, when we talk about a dead networks, info exploding for no great reason, is something we need to track and think about more.
      - Loquebantur 3y ago
        HN is no "decent web of trust". People are anonymous, they post anonymously and comment as such. Accordingly, incentive to contribute substantially is minimal at best. Look at your own comment: you didn't really read what I wrote and made some cheap whataboutism-statement. Useless information rotting away in the void until final deletion is no problem. Incentive to spam others without blowback is.
- zokier 3y ago
  /. format was nice even with its faults. Also allowed to have multiple links in single post. But yeah, editing those summaries is both huge workload and easily very contentious.
  - greenpresident 3y ago
    If it’s all bots, what’s another one really.
- p0w3n3d 3y ago
  sometimes those are farms of people doing multi-account product placement/opinion spreading
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Guessing gold farmers were the first to lose their jobs to AI.
- drpixie 3y ago
  Personally, I think the video could be improved by having a transcript or text version. (This applies to almost all videos.)
- guerrilla 3y ago
  I think it was r/geopolitics (or maybe r/credibledefense? both?) where the author themselves have to make a submission statement as a comment summarizing the article and what it's about.
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
The dead internet theory is a creepypasta-originated belief about the internet being basically empty and almost all content being produced by bots. This has nothing to do with the objective reality that in order to maintain the web a lot of bots are used and contribute to the majority of the traffic
- _hypx 3y ago
  It can be true for specific websites. And while it won't fool dedicated users, it can be good enough to convince casual users and poorly informed investors.
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    Or specific apps: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/social-app-irl-which-raised-200-million-shuts-down-after-ceo-misconduct-probe https://www.theinformation.com/articles/social-app-irl-which... It’s already happening.
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  >The dead internet theory is a creepypasta-tier belief Sure, but how long until it becomes objectively true?
  - thumbuddy 3y ago
    Not long. Once locally hosted LLMs become just a little more ergonomic the main advantages that the internet offered society will be gone. The internet is a great microcosm for a global society, it'll be worth studying just how bad it gets...
- numlock86 3y ago
  That's exactly what a GPT bot would produce to hide the fact that none of you are real and I am just posting within my custom AI crafted bubble of "internet"!
- itsnotwrong 3y ago
wslh 3y ago
Another theory, a positive one, is that AI could really help to absorbe the trash on Internet like a vacuum cleaner. But it is also important to highlight that because Internet is omniprescent most people would consume "dumb" content in the same way that happened with TV and other media in the past. It is elitist to think that Internet is only for looking at smart stuff and not basic entertainment.
- wnkrshm 3y ago
  I doubt that, looking at how bad the SOTA in detecting generated text is or conversely how human-like the generated text has become.
- throwaway5Am1k 3y ago
  A lot of people come to HN just to read the comments section though.
  - wslh 3y ago
    Or just reply to them without adding any value to the conversation.
redbell 3y ago
There’s also a Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
ianai 3y ago
Explain cat videos. But more seriously, it is important to consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given. I would say a strong down weight in general is most useful. Consider whether it really helps matters or severely hurts progress to react to the noise. Thinking of troll farms pushing content and adding flamey content to threads. It’d be better if people had some built in skepticism. Edit-Also, there absolutely will always be someone who disagrees with you/any comment on the internet. And they’re the most likely to respond to that comment. So while there’s a huge amount of actual information on the internet there is far, far more much noise. Actual knowledge and wisdom are going to have to be independently verifiable. Like reading a book, multiple sources, choose sources with demonstrated quality etc.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given The problem with this - and it applies to BS in regular media as well - is that it doesn't matter so much what I find important, as what my fellow voters, and real policy makers, find important. Flat earthers are harmless on their own. If flat earthers start making transport policy, things are going to stop working.
  - ianai 3y ago
    Thing is, flat earthers are a minority. And if the systems of government succeed in representing the relatively quiet majority instead of the loud minorities then transport policy won’t stop working for at least that reason. (Still could for other reasons…”cutting off your nose to spite your face” as an example.) It’s an example of a “bad idea”: an idea which displaces better understanding and further attempts at understanding. Precisely because of that, bad ideas are ends and are like the false fronts on buildings in the old west. They seem larger and more profound from only the front side, but take a little walk behind the main argument and the shallowness reveals itself and its fundamental futility.
- noobermin 3y ago
  Things like me-too happened primarily due to internet discourse. It may or may not have had an impact on society but it was partly due to social media.
sirmarksalot 3y ago
The cadence and format of this video actually makes it look AI-generated. The content is padded and repeats itself quite a lot, the video is pretty much all stock footage, and the audio lacks any kind of variation in style like you'd expect even if someone were reading off a script. It sounds exactly like what you'd hear if you fed a script into a modern TTS.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Unfortunately that’s how many YouTubers make videos. I was watching a video about Chinese manufacturing the other day by Bloomberg, and 15 minutes worth of content was thinly stretched to 45 in a similar manner.
  - faeyanpiraat 3y ago
    The more crappy TV documentaries worked like this since forever.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Well, since cable-TV anyway.
  - devinjon 3y ago
    True. Regards media peeps, if AI can do your job, you need to try harder.
- ricardo81 3y ago
  Came across many YT videos where you can almost smell the lifted content and structure from Wikipedia (or another video), often by people who aren't experts on the topic they're covering. History channels that are unable to tell the difference between England and Great Britain being a personal peeve. Google is quite good at detecting duplicate text content, apparently duplicate video content isn't so much a thing.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Algorithmic capitalism already trained humans to be bots. And so, not much of value was lost. :D
Mordisquitos 3y ago
I'm torn. I found the theme of this video as thought-provoking as I found its closing remarks eye-wateringly trite. The premise of the "Dead Internet" may or may not be true, but if we are to assume that it is, I think that ending on the "positive note" that something is being done about it by tech giants developing "safeguards" based on AI-detecting-AI is naïve and superficial. Also, saying that "education on media literacy and critical thinking skills may go a long way too" is as hackneyed as stating that improved firefighting resources may go a long way to deal with the Canada wildfires. If we accept the premise of the Dead Internet as true, this is a systemic issue which needs to be dealt with on a systems-level (i.e. economic, social and political), and not by the very architects of this flawed system adding their own little patches —which will just result in an AI arms-race— nor by improving the "media literacy" of the World population so they know how to deal with this broken system —a new arms-race. Avoiding the consequences of the Dead Internet should not rely on saving the current social-media-attention-economy-internet from AI-bot infestation and expecting people to be "educated" against it. It should rely on either fully rethinking, overhauling and/or shutting down this social-media-attention-economy-internet, or alternatively on helping society to abandon-ship and let this bot-infested internet go the way of Myspace and Digg in terms of social relevance. The one thing that AI content cannot do is get in the way of society's ability to touch grass.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  It is really about people not knowing epistemology? In order to be anything other than a big distraction, information on the internet needs to be true. Which means, it needs to be from real humans, about real life, the real world, providing real useful knowledge. Epistemology intends to explain how that works. In particular, you need the information to take a trustworthy channel from its source to recipients. Anonymity is one principal contradiction there.
- JanneVee 3y ago
  Well if The Dead Internet isn't true there is potential with the latest progress generative AI it might become true. There is an argument to be made that it has the potential to kill social media as we know it, depending on what the majority of people see a point in engaging with non-human generated content. Seeing how chess players treat cheaters, there is hope!
p0w3n3d 3y ago
Tim Burners->Berners Lee
omgmajk 3y ago
I've seen a couple of videos on this topic and it's always been a hit/miss situation for me but this is an interesting topic that I like to think about in a not so serious way - because there is something to it in the end even if it is a meme/conspiracy theory/whatever.
BizarreByte 3y ago
I used to be torn on this conspiracy theory, but I just accept it at this point. It's pretty clear that a huge number of comments on sites like Reddit are if not bots, paid for spam/manipulation. The amount humans, let alone people commenting in good faith is so low as to not make it worth engaging. There's too much for bad actors and companies to gain, there's no way they're leaving this kind of opportunity on the table, especially as bots get much, much better at appearing human. It is kind of funny when occasionally a bot messes up and posts the same comment more than once in a thread across more than one account. I think this is why people increasingly prefer closed off, invite only communities as well. You can vet people coming into a discord community a lot easier and avoid a lot of the nonsense that happens on more open, public, spaces like Reddit, or Twitter.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  A lot of so-called "conspiracy theories," including this one, are quite rational once you replace the conspirators with the profit motive under capitalism.
- JanneVee 3y ago
  Yeah it doesn't require that everything is actual bots but people behaving like bots. To amend to that I've found that the bigger forums are full of actual people that are just regurgitating the most common talking points on issues and trying to discuss them deeper or developing them is pointless, because the people doing it are just there to root for their "team" not convincing anyone of their point of view. Discussions might disprove their arguments so it is avoided at all cost, with that all discussions become vapid bullshit which does nothing in the world.
verisimi 3y ago
.... and if we think its bad now, its going to be waaayy worse in a few years, with ai bots undertaking most activity online. OMG, real life is beckoning!! I'm going to have to get dressed and go outside again!
chaosjevil 3y ago
I don't think that the internet is currently dead ("dead" = "bot activity mistaken for human activity greatly surpassing genuinely human activity"), but that this is a real future concern. One thing to take into account is that current bots suck major balls. Specially when it comes to utterance purpose, and for longer utterances; they fail the Turing test really hard, provided that the one asking "is this a bot or a human?" is able to interpret utterances based on nearby utterances and non-textual information around it. In other words if the internet was dead already we would've noticed it. And someone might argue "ackshyually, there are more advanced bots that model language on pragmatic levels, you just don't know about them because it's all hidden!". Well, then you get a conspiracy "theory" with its typical appeal to ignorance, not something worth thinking about.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
I remember reading the original thread on agora road. Alongside it I read a thread about a guy who did a government contract to build something like this, and for the life of me I can't seem to find it anymore. I'm sure it's there but searchability on that site is not good and the recommendation on it weighs recent stuff to heavily. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
harrisoned 3y ago
While i think bots and AI is indeed widespread, i think this percentage is accurate only in very specific places. The internet isn't dead, sometimes we (tech people) don't take in consideration how much of the world actually uses the web for things/in ways we wouldn't even consider (bad and good), and how much of it contributes nothing and easily passes as just background noise for us and could, easily, passes as a bot writing.

53 points by redbell 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago

I always think HN could be improved by having a paragraph summary of each link in addition to the title. (Of course how and who would create such a summary then becomes a problem). Anyway the summary of this link to save anyone clicking through (copied from the youtube summary): The internet is ever changing, but over the past couple of years things have started to change. The proportion of bots in increasing. A theory dubbed “The Dead Internet Theory” that states that most of the internet is in fact AI bots. These bots have been unleashed to control the populous and rake in profits. But is it true? And if so, how much of it is true?

adrian_mrd 3y ago
HN-GPT? /s
gsatic 3y ago
It is true. UN has a report on it - https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_feb.pdf https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_... The only small correction would be AI is not required. What was required to overwhelm everything is Cost of Broadcast dropping to 0. Spammers and scammers can mass bombard billions 24*7 cause there is no big cost per message sent. The cost is borne by the receiver to wade through the ever growing sewage placed in front of them. As a result less than 0.5% of content produced is consumed as mentioned in the report. Its probably similar to HN but HN is not going to measure it or inform you about it.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  You need a web of trust, not a web of advertisement and anonymous spam. Just as in real life, there needs to be the possibility to reliably identify yourself easily to others and establish trusted channels of communication. Not just in a P2P manner, but in the sense of a town meeting. Your attention is worth real money, it is billable working hours. Anonymous actors with ill intent stealing it is a crime without prosecution. That should change.
  - gsatic 3y ago
    You could say HN has a decent web of trust, but it doesn't solve the info overload problem. Think of how many links are not being clicked or read by anyone. HN can show us the number everyday. If they say for every 100 links submitted only 1 is getting read. And month by month that 100 is growing to 1000 and 10000 why should/will ppl submit links? HN looks alive. But right now who knows what the number is so the submissions and traffic keep flowing and growing. Scaling it up, when we talk about a dead networks, info exploding for no great reason, is something we need to track and think about more.
    - Loquebantur 3y ago
      HN is no "decent web of trust". People are anonymous, they post anonymously and comment as such. Accordingly, incentive to contribute substantially is minimal at best. Look at your own comment: you didn't really read what I wrote and made some cheap whataboutism-statement. Useless information rotting away in the void until final deletion is no problem. Incentive to spam others without blowback is.
zokier 3y ago
/. format was nice even with its faults. Also allowed to have multiple links in single post. But yeah, editing those summaries is both huge workload and easily very contentious.
- greenpresident 3y ago
  If it’s all bots, what’s another one really.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
sometimes those are farms of people doing multi-account product placement/opinion spreading
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Guessing gold farmers were the first to lose their jobs to AI.
drpixie 3y ago
Personally, I think the video could be improved by having a transcript or text version. (This applies to almost all videos.)
guerrilla 3y ago
I think it was r/geopolitics (or maybe r/credibledefense? both?) where the author themselves have to make a submission statement as a comment summarizing the article and what it's about.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

The dead internet theory is a creepypasta-originated belief about the internet being basically empty and almost all content being produced by bots. This has nothing to do with the objective reality that in order to maintain the web a lot of bots are used and contribute to the majority of the traffic

_hypx 3y ago
It can be true for specific websites. And while it won't fool dedicated users, it can be good enough to convince casual users and poorly informed investors.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  Or specific apps: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/social-app-irl-which-raised-200-million-shuts-down-after-ceo-misconduct-probe https://www.theinformation.com/articles/social-app-irl-which... It’s already happening.
wintermutestwin 3y ago
>The dead internet theory is a creepypasta-tier belief Sure, but how long until it becomes objectively true?
- thumbuddy 3y ago
  Not long. Once locally hosted LLMs become just a little more ergonomic the main advantages that the internet offered society will be gone. The internet is a great microcosm for a global society, it'll be worth studying just how bad it gets...
numlock86 3y ago
That's exactly what a GPT bot would produce to hide the fact that none of you are real and I am just posting within my custom AI crafted bubble of "internet"!
itsnotwrong 3y ago

wslh 3y ago

Another theory, a positive one, is that AI could really help to absorbe the trash on Internet like a vacuum cleaner. But it is also important to highlight that because Internet is omniprescent most people would consume "dumb" content in the same way that happened with TV and other media in the past. It is elitist to think that Internet is only for looking at smart stuff and not basic entertainment.

wnkrshm 3y ago
I doubt that, looking at how bad the SOTA in detecting generated text is or conversely how human-like the generated text has become.
throwaway5Am1k 3y ago
A lot of people come to HN just to read the comments section though.
- wslh 3y ago
  Or just reply to them without adding any value to the conversation.

redbell 3y ago

There’s also a Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

ianai 3y ago

Explain cat videos. But more seriously, it is important to consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given. I would say a strong down weight in general is most useful. Consider whether it really helps matters or severely hurts progress to react to the noise. Thinking of troll farms pushing content and adding flamey content to threads. It’d be better if people had some built in skepticism. Edit-Also, there absolutely will always be someone who disagrees with you/any comment on the internet. And they’re the most likely to respond to that comment. So while there’s a huge amount of actual information on the internet there is far, far more much noise. Actual knowledge and wisdom are going to have to be independently verifiable. Like reading a book, multiple sources, choose sources with demonstrated quality etc.

pjc50 3y ago
> consider just how much importance any internet discussion should be given The problem with this - and it applies to BS in regular media as well - is that it doesn't matter so much what I find important, as what my fellow voters, and real policy makers, find important. Flat earthers are harmless on their own. If flat earthers start making transport policy, things are going to stop working.
- ianai 3y ago
  Thing is, flat earthers are a minority. And if the systems of government succeed in representing the relatively quiet majority instead of the loud minorities then transport policy won’t stop working for at least that reason. (Still could for other reasons…”cutting off your nose to spite your face” as an example.) It’s an example of a “bad idea”: an idea which displaces better understanding and further attempts at understanding. Precisely because of that, bad ideas are ends and are like the false fronts on buildings in the old west. They seem larger and more profound from only the front side, but take a little walk behind the main argument and the shallowness reveals itself and its fundamental futility.
noobermin 3y ago
Things like me-too happened primarily due to internet discourse. It may or may not have had an impact on society but it was partly due to social media.

sirmarksalot 3y ago

The cadence and format of this video actually makes it look AI-generated. The content is padded and repeats itself quite a lot, the video is pretty much all stock footage, and the audio lacks any kind of variation in style like you'd expect even if someone were reading off a script. It sounds exactly like what you'd hear if you fed a script into a modern TTS.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Unfortunately that’s how many YouTubers make videos. I was watching a video about Chinese manufacturing the other day by Bloomberg, and 15 minutes worth of content was thinly stretched to 45 in a similar manner.
- faeyanpiraat 3y ago
  The more crappy TV documentaries worked like this since forever.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Well, since cable-TV anyway.
- devinjon 3y ago
  True. Regards media peeps, if AI can do your job, you need to try harder.
ricardo81 3y ago
Came across many YT videos where you can almost smell the lifted content and structure from Wikipedia (or another video), often by people who aren't experts on the topic they're covering. History channels that are unable to tell the difference between England and Great Britain being a personal peeve. Google is quite good at detecting duplicate text content, apparently duplicate video content isn't so much a thing.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Algorithmic capitalism already trained humans to be bots. And so, not much of value was lost. :D

Mordisquitos 3y ago

I'm torn. I found the theme of this video as thought-provoking as I found its closing remarks eye-wateringly trite. The premise of the "Dead Internet" may or may not be true, but if we are to assume that it is, I think that ending on the "positive note" that something is being done about it by tech giants developing "safeguards" based on AI-detecting-AI is naïve and superficial. Also, saying that "education on media literacy and critical thinking skills may go a long way too" is as hackneyed as stating that improved firefighting resources may go a long way to deal with the Canada wildfires. If we accept the premise of the Dead Internet as true, this is a systemic issue which needs to be dealt with on a systems-level (i.e. economic, social and political), and not by the very architects of this flawed system adding their own little patches —which will just result in an AI arms-race— nor by improving the "media literacy" of the World population so they know how to deal with this broken system —a new arms-race. Avoiding the consequences of the Dead Internet should not rely on saving the current social-media-attention-economy-internet from AI-bot infestation and expecting people to be "educated" against it. It should rely on either fully rethinking, overhauling and/or shutting down this social-media-attention-economy-internet, or alternatively on helping society to abandon-ship and let this bot-infested internet go the way of Myspace and Digg in terms of social relevance. The one thing that AI content cannot do is get in the way of society's ability to touch grass.

Loquebantur 3y ago
It is really about people not knowing epistemology? In order to be anything other than a big distraction, information on the internet needs to be true. Which means, it needs to be from real humans, about real life, the real world, providing real useful knowledge. Epistemology intends to explain how that works. In particular, you need the information to take a trustworthy channel from its source to recipients. Anonymity is one principal contradiction there.
JanneVee 3y ago
Well if The Dead Internet isn't true there is potential with the latest progress generative AI it might become true. There is an argument to be made that it has the potential to kill social media as we know it, depending on what the majority of people see a point in engaging with non-human generated content. Seeing how chess players treat cheaters, there is hope!

p0w3n3d 3y ago

Tim Burners->Berners Lee

omgmajk 3y ago

I've seen a couple of videos on this topic and it's always been a hit/miss situation for me but this is an interesting topic that I like to think about in a not so serious way - because there is something to it in the end even if it is a meme/conspiracy theory/whatever.

BizarreByte 3y ago

I used to be torn on this conspiracy theory, but I just accept it at this point. It's pretty clear that a huge number of comments on sites like Reddit are if not bots, paid for spam/manipulation. The amount humans, let alone people commenting in good faith is so low as to not make it worth engaging. There's too much for bad actors and companies to gain, there's no way they're leaving this kind of opportunity on the table, especially as bots get much, much better at appearing human. It is kind of funny when occasionally a bot messes up and posts the same comment more than once in a thread across more than one account. I think this is why people increasingly prefer closed off, invite only communities as well. You can vet people coming into a discord community a lot easier and avoid a lot of the nonsense that happens on more open, public, spaces like Reddit, or Twitter.

111111IIIIIII 3y ago
A lot of so-called "conspiracy theories," including this one, are quite rational once you replace the conspirators with the profit motive under capitalism.
JanneVee 3y ago
Yeah it doesn't require that everything is actual bots but people behaving like bots. To amend to that I've found that the bigger forums are full of actual people that are just regurgitating the most common talking points on issues and trying to discuss them deeper or developing them is pointless, because the people doing it are just there to root for their "team" not convincing anyone of their point of view. Discussions might disprove their arguments so it is avoided at all cost, with that all discussions become vapid bullshit which does nothing in the world.

verisimi 3y ago

.... and if we think its bad now, its going to be waaayy worse in a few years, with ai bots undertaking most activity online. OMG, real life is beckoning!! I'm going to have to get dressed and go outside again!

chaosjevil 3y ago

I don't think that the internet is currently dead ("dead" = "bot activity mistaken for human activity greatly surpassing genuinely human activity"), but that this is a real future concern. One thing to take into account is that current bots suck major balls. Specially when it comes to utterance purpose, and for longer utterances; they fail the Turing test really hard, provided that the one asking "is this a bot or a human?" is able to interpret utterances based on nearby utterances and non-textual information around it. In other words if the internet was dead already we would've noticed it. And someone might argue "ackshyually, there are more advanced bots that model language on pragmatic levels, you just don't know about them because it's all hidden!". Well, then you get a conspiracy "theory" with its typical appeal to ignorance, not something worth thinking about.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

I remember reading the original thread on agora road. Alongside it I read a thread about a guy who did a government contract to build something like this, and for the life of me I can't seem to find it anymore. I'm sure it's there but searchability on that site is not good and the recommendation on it weighs recent stuff to heavily. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

harrisoned 3y ago

While i think bots and AI is indeed widespread, i think this percentage is accurate only in very specific places. The internet isn't dead, sometimes we (tech people) don't take in consideration how much of the world actually uses the web for things/in ways we wouldn't even consider (bad and good), and how much of it contributes nothing and easily passes as just background noise for us and could, easily, passes as a bot writing.