The Internet is Fake (Dead Internet Theory)

hi welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion since its invention in 1989 by Tim Bernice Lee the web has been a place for people to share thoughts ideas and generally communicate but today something is changing what if some of the users that you interact with in comment sections or social media sites are not human there's a theory dubbed the dead internet theory that takes things further broadly it states that most of the activity on the Internet is in fact the work of bots have we witnessed the death of the internet and not even noticed since the fledgling start of language AI systems most people boast that they can tell apart a human conversation versus one with an AI system but what happens if this isn't the case or see an interesting example of this later in the episode but for now let's Dive Into the Dead internet Theory [Music] in 2021 a user by the name of Illuminati pirate posted a long ranting document called the dead internet theory on the Agora Road forum the original post contained some questionable language but there are some interesting ideas contained within it the general thesis is this every day content is created accessed and shared by what we think are people but increasingly this content is being generated by Bots Bots without a heartbeat Bots without thoughts or feelings the internet has basically become a sea of bots with some islands of human activity and it's quote sterile and devoid of people for all intents and purposes the internet is dead the dead internet Theory claims that AI content is mass produced to manipulate users thoughts and feelings control populations and manufacture fake consumers for products that all does sound plausible but where the theory goes off the rails is by claiming that the internet is controlled by a small group of people these internet overlords use these spots to spy on us and control Humanity I think the rise of AI Bots is more to do with profit and occasionally geopolitical foreign interference it's not some evil group of mustache twirlers and besides back in 2021 when the theory was first proposed there was no widespread generative AI flooding the entire internet with Bots would have taken too many resources and too much coordination to be feasible for only such a small group of people excluding the nefarious plot part of the theory how realistic is the rest of it the dead internet Theory can only be one of three things absurd a reality or a prophecy of what's to come which is it the craziest thing is that the ideas expressed are only becoming more true as time progresses there's no getting away from the fact that humans proportional relationship to bots is changing in 2021 a study showed that only 57.7 percent of users on the internet were human harmful bots made up 27.7 an increase of 2.1 percent from the previous year good Bots can be things like search engine crawlers whereas bad Bots can carry out malicious attacks the overall rate of Bot growth was negative but recently this is reversed and the proportion of humans is the lowest in eight years and most concerningly bad Bots are increasing at a rate of 5 per year another estimate says that Bots can be up to 64 of the internet whilst data isn't available just yet the burgeoning abilities of generative AI will undoubtedly impact these numbers in the future the theory also talks about AI influences although not so easy in 2021 today it wouldn't be hard to set up an Instagram profile of someone generated entirely in mid-journey [Music] day one so the first step in creating the next viral influencer the next Charlie demilio the next Addison Ray is well creating that paid ten dollars for Mid Journey V5 to get a slightly less horrifying influencer to make famous introducing April Isabella where I cannot believe this is not a real person what the actual hi now of course the first thing that every famous influencer needs is an Instagram so I started April's profile and used chat gbt to write her a buyer making soap and candles learning languages and stargazing collecting vinyl and playing games plant mom quirky girl okay then I use mid-journey again to generate some photos that would match the quirky white girl aesthetic that we all know in picture of a Plus Gym one of her hanging out with friends and of course one of her at Starbucks surprisingly April's posts were actually getting liked somehow now to be fair they were definitely all bonds but that's not important [Music] in May of 2023 influencer Karen metri made an AI version of herself to sell to fans Die Hard followers could pay one dollar a minute to talk to her well the chat gpt4 version of her anyway it's the AI version of the influencer that could be their personal girlfriend it's straight out of Black Mirror but it is the kind of thing we'll see more of in the future the theory goes on to state that social media may be mostly Bots too an article by the publication the Atlantic looked at examples of tweets with the exact same text repeated by countless accounts with eerily similar profile pictures and most weirdly of all these accounts had huge engagement levels far more than would be expected of an account of this nature in 2018 data scientist Tom Leung warned of an inversion point where YouTube Bots would make up a larger percentage of viewership than real people this was distort analytics and make it harder to identify real traffic from fake traffic basically it would destroy YouTube there's no evidence that this has happened on YouTube just yet but on Facebook it's already happened in 2019 Facebook shut down a staggering 5.4 billion fake accounts more than twice the number of real accounts on the site it's a trend that's set to continue with experts from the Copenhagen Institute for future studies predicting that buyer 2025-2026 nearly 99 of the internet will be generated by artificial intelligence the Bots will win they will outweigh humans and in this scenario the internet may be very well dead after all not all of this internet traffic will be bad though a lot of these Bots will perform helpful tasks for people like customer service Assistance or even Auto GPT style stuff where you can ask it to go out to the internet and do anything for you but regardless computer scientists will have to come up with novel ways to mitigate the damage the past it was easy to spot a bot they were clunky unhuman in their appearance and communication style so we could just ignore those Instagram DMS saying that we'd want a gift card or an email that claims that we're due a huge tax refund and we could just get on with our day but as AI evolves the line will blur between human produced content and AI generated content I encourage you to watch a video by the YouTube channel Jubilee in it they ran an interesting experiment by only using questions and answers in text format six humans had the task of guessing who among them was a secret AI imposter my goal would be to blend in with the human competitors as much as possible without giving any clues that I am an AI when people are constantly on their phones and not present in the moment lol noises because just like stop foreign [Music] is going to crash into my living room every time a loud one flies over [Music] I don't know I was just being extra I guess I was just numbering like one two three trying to be organized maybe I was thinking too much like an AI but I wouldn't have did that I think I would have won I'm sure that I answered the questions pretty quickly which is probably why I also got voted out because they were kind of short and sweet what's the craziest dream you've had the night I got my wisdom teeth removed I had a dream that glass was coming out of my gums where my teeth had been a robot no LOL if the lights turn green that you have successfully voted out the AI and you win the lights turn red that means the AI still in the box and you all lose three two one yes money it was extremely hard for them to tell and multiple humans were voted out for being AI it just goes to show you how far we've come in the 1950s British computer scientist Alan Turing developed a test to measure a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent Behavior indistinguishable from that of a human it's called the touring test and it's become The Benchmark for realistic language AI if you want to have a go at it yourself AI 21 Labs has released a gamified social version of the Turing test called human or not in the game users are invited to have a conversation and decide whether they're speaking to a human or a robot as we all know developments are moving at lightning speed as of today though only two AI systems are capable of passing the touring test albeit in narrow settings Google's Lambda was the first chat bot to pass the touring test in July of 2022 and of course open ai's chat GPT became the second one to pass the test we're also starting to see studies that suggest humans are beginning to trust AI to validate facts and make decisions over other humans a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Georgia found that given a choice of trusting medical information provided by humans or generated by AI people were more likely to trust the information provided by the AI you hypnotized at a time when information online should be endless browsing the web can feel repetitive like there's nothing new to see but soon there may be swaths of text conversations images and even whole websites and videos generated by AI from scammers to fake reviews to online generated information being filled with lies and half truths if we're not careful we could be entering a post-truth world there's a lot of issues coming our way but there is a ray of Hope many companies are starting to fight AI with AI there's a growing trend of creating AI detection tools a prototype also exists that takes a paragraph of text and ascertains whether or not it was generated by AI this can be achieved by tweaking the choice of words selected by chat GPT that can be picked up by a tool looking for AI generated text but all of this would be unnoticeable to the user such technology could be adapted for other forms of generative AI Google and Microsoft are working on their own version for images these are all great steps and if more companies follow suit we may at least stand a chance of combating the wave of low quality AI stuff coming critical thinking seeking further context and technological literacy will be increasingly important the bottom line is we all have to be more discerning foreign [Music] conclusion while the original dead internet Theory may be a bit crackpot it ended up being a prediction of a likely future if nothing changes generic AI generated comments and posts will take up more of our online spaces but ending on a positive note there is something that can be and is being done about it from Google's digital markets to Microsoft's content credentials further developing these safeguards are arguably as important as the development of the technology itself education on media literacy and critical thinking skills may go a long way too although once we do have a framework in place we can enjoy the productivity and creativity gains brought about by using AI as a tool and as an aid alright so that is the dead internet Theory and how AI is playing into that hope you learned something if you did feel free to have a look around on the channel there's plenty of interesting stuff on here on science technology business and history anyway my name is and you've been watching cold fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode cheers guys have a good one foreign [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 784,483

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: 9WB5grLMXkU

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023