Have you ever really stopped to think how much
of your time online is actually spent interacting
with, well not humans, beat? The answer, if you
really look into it, it might genuinely surprise
you. And it's leading a lot of people to ask
this pretty profound question. Is the internet
that we knew, you know, that big messy human
place, is it maybe? Fading. Welcome to the Deep
Dive. Today, we're really going to get into a
concept that's quietly gaining some serious traction.
The dead internet theory. This isn't just some
fringe idea from obscure forums anymore. No,
it's being talked about, even worried about,
by industry folks, data scientists. So our job
today is to try and separate the panic from the
actual reality. We'll use the facts, the data
we have, to see what's really going on. Exactly.
Our mission here is to explore what the data
is actually telling us about AI's, well, kind
of silent takeover. We're going to look at the
numbers, quantify this bot tsunami, then we'll
unpack why spotting AI content isn't as easy
as you might think. We'll look at the economic
shifts, how the internet's business model is
changing, and then, crucially, look at the proposed
solutions. And yeah, there are tricky downsides.
It's sort of a shortcut to understanding why
the internet feels different lately and what
that really means for you day to day. OK, let's
unpack this bot tsunami then, these new AI models
like ChatGPT. What was it that made them such
a huge game changer? Well, it really comes down
to how well they can mimic human chat. These
models, especially the ones everyone can access,
the large language models, they basically just
smashed the Turing test. Ah, the Turing test.
That's the classic one, right? Where an AI tries
to fool you into thinking it's human. Exactly.
Can a machine imitate a person so well you just
can't tell the difference? That's the test, in
a nutshell. And before these big LLMs, that was
a pretty high bar. Now, it's almost normal. So
they crossed some kind of threshold. They got
really good at sounding human. And that's what
kicked off this machine invasion. Pretty much.
Yeah. And the scale of it. I mean, this is where
it gets really interesting. The numbers are quite
stark. Get this. The Imperva bad bot report for
2025. It found that 51 % of all internet traffic
in 2024 was automated. Wait, over half? Over
half. Just machines talking to other machines,
basically. And maybe more worrying, 37 % of that
automated traffic was malicious. That's a record
high. So it's a lot of automated stuff, and a
big chunk of it isn't friendly. 51%. Wow. That's...
That's incredible. It's like there's this whole
other internet running underneath ours, just
bots chatting. It kind of feels like that sometimes,
yeah. And the speed it's growing is just wild.
Look at Cloudflare's data. Perplexity bot traffic.
It surged by something like 157 ,490%, almost
unbelievable. 157 ,000%. Yeah. And the bots that
LLMs use to grab real -time info, those retrieval
bots, they grew by 49 % in just the first quarter
of 2025. Just Q1. It's an explosion. That's not
just growth. That's... Exponential isn't even
the word. Absolutely. And think about the sheer
power behind some of these. TechRadar said, open
AI's crawlers alone send out over a billion requests
a month. A billion? From one company's bots?
Yep. And fastly found that those open AI bots
made up, get this, 98 % of all the global Fetcher
bot traffic in 2025. 98%. Whoa. Just... Imagine
scaling to a billion requests a month. Just one
AI. That really is a silent invasion, isn't it?
But massive. It's like this unseen digital city
humming away beneath us. These aren't just numbers,
you know? It paints this picture of the internet
becoming, well, mostly a machine conversation.
That's a really good way to put it. And it's
not just like... reading web pages. Over a third
of all web traffic back in May 2025 came from
APIs. APIs, remind us. That's like how different
computer programs talk to each other, right?
Exactly. That's the short version. So a third
of traffic from APIs in these autonomous agents,
not people clicking around, and all this activity,
it puts a massive strain on the infrastructure.
Wikimedia, for instance, they said bots are only
35 % of their page views, but they eat up 65
% of the resources for the complex stuff. So
they're disproportionately resource -hungry.
Hugely. Wikimedia saw their bandwidth use jump
50 % in early 2025 just from AI scraping. Yeah.
And there was an ARCIDIS study found that for
many small servers like 80, 95 % of their traffic
is now AI crawlers. 80 to 95%. Yeah. It basically
makes it impossible or at least prohibitively
expensive for them to run. chokes out the little
human run sites. So, okay, with all this machine
interaction, this overwhelming bot traffic, what
does that actually mean for our experience, you
know, when we just go online day -to -day? Well,
fundamentally, you'll find less unique human
stuff, just a lot more digital noise. Right.
Now, I think a lot of us feel like, oh, I can
spot AI content, you know. We look for those
slightly weird phrases, maybe delve or tapestry
or those super complex sentences. That chart
showing the word delve just shooting up in research
papers after ChatGPT came out, I mean, that's
hard to ignore. But is that confidence really
right? Or are we maybe fooling ourselves a bit?
That's such a key point. Yeah. Because here's
the twist, right? You're nacked for detecting
AI. It isn't really some kind of superpower you
developed. It's more that you've gotten really
good at spotting one specific AI persona, the
chat GPT persona. Ah, okay. So it's not all AI,
just the one we see most often. Exactly. See,
these models get trained on, like, the whole
internet, but then they get fine -tuned. They're
fed a smaller set of stuff the creators think
is good writing. Yeah. And that process, it created
a very specific, very recognizable voice or persona.
So we're just recognizing that style. Precisely.
You haven't magically become an AI detector.
You've become a chat GPT detector. Other models,
like Kimi for moonshot AI, huge in China. They
have a totally different way of sounding. And
they're probably just flying under our radar
completely. And I gotta admit, even I still wrestle
with prompt drift sometimes. Prompt drift. That's
when the AI's output kind of wanders away from
what you first asked it. Yeah, exactly. Its output
subtly changes from your original intention.
It's subtle, but yeah. Sometimes I feel like
I'm writing to the AI, trying to guess its style,
instead of just using it as a tool. It's a weird
feeling. That raises a really important question
then. What happens when the AI starts learning
mostly from, well, from other AI content? I've
heard this called model collapse, or sometimes
the feedback loop of mediocrity. What does that
actually mean for the quality of stuff online?
That is exactly the worry. Model collapse is
basically what happens when AI systems get trained
on data that's full of their own outputs, stuff
they generated before. It leads to this degradation.
The quality, the diversity, the originality just
goes down over time. So everything starts sounding
the same? Pretty much. We risk creating this
closed loop, this information echo chamber, where
everything's just a rehash of a rehash. We lose
that human spark, that unpredictability. Defined
as... AI quality degrades when it learns from
its own recycled outputs. About right. That's
a good way to put it. Yeah. So thinking about
human creativity, original thought, what's the
real danger of this kind of uniform AI voice
taking over? Well, the danger is that true human
creativity just gets drowned out. Originality
gets diluted. OK, so it's not just the content.
The actual business model of the internet seems
like it's under threat too. Yeah. We're heading
towards this future where AI agents don't just
write stuff. They do stuff for us. They execute
tasks. Yeah. And what's really fascinating or
maybe scary, depending on your view, is that
optimizing your software just for humans, that
might actually be a losing strategy soon. Really?
How so? Because companies will increasingly need
to build for AI agents. Think about advertising.
AI agents, they're totally immune to all the
psychological tricks marketers use. Like, an
AI agent doesn't care at all if Sydney Sweeney
wears those jeans in the ad. Huh. Right. No celebrity
influence. None. It just optimizes for logic.
Show me skinny jeans, under $30, locally sourced,
rated 4 .5 stars or higher, best durability score,
pure data. Marketers use celebrities because
we humans tend to emulate people we admire. Right?
And AI. Yeah, ignores that completely. So ads
aimed at agents will just be spec sheets, basically.
Essentially, yeah. Optimized for machine readable
stuff. Right. Price, return policy clarity, shipping
speed guarantees, super detailed product specs.
So the whole attention economy grabbing human
eyeballs that's giving way to this agentic economy,
it's about efficiency, verifiable data. And who
wings in that world? Well, obviously, the company's
making the best base AI agents. Your open AI
is Google's Entropix. But also businesses that
have really clean, well -documented APIs. Because
that makes it easy for the agents to find and
use their products or services. APIs, again,
the way programs talk. So having a good robot
doorway becomes critical. Exactly. A good robot
doorway. I like that. So this shift to an agentic
economy, how does that fundamentally change how
companies even reach us? Or maybe reach our agents
effectively. Marketing totally shifts away from
emotion towards pure, verifiable, machine -readable
data. Mid -roll sponsor read. Okay, so the genie's
out. We can't just, you know... turn off AI,
that's not happening. But if the internet is
filling up with bots, we definitely need ways
to figure out who's human online. What are the
main ideas being thrown around for making that
distinction? How do we verify humanness? Well,
one big concept is proof of humanhood. P -O -H,
they call it. And there are a couple of main
flavors. One is based on blockchain. People like
OpenAI, Microsoft, Oxford University have proposed
this. Blockchain. Like Bitcoin sort of yeah using
that underlying tech for decentralized anonymous
personhood IDs It relies on something called
zero knowledge proofs zero knowledge proofs.
Okay, what's that in plain English? It's basically
a way to prove something is true Like your unique
human without revealing the actual sensitive
data about who you are. Ah Okay, so privacy is
built in that's the idea it creates this kind
of proof of human layer over the internet potentially
interesting What about other approaches things
based on? us, our bodies, biometrics. Yeah, that's
definitely on the table too. WorldCoin is probably
the most famous example. That's the Sam Altman
project, right, from OpenAI. The very same. Their
approach involves scanning people's irises. Unique
identifier. Ooh, scanning eyeballs. That sounds
intense. It does, yeah. And it raises huge privacy
red flags for a lot of people. The idea of a
massive global database of everyone's iris scans,
potential for mass surveillance. It's understandable
why people are worried. It's a big trade -off.
OK, so that's proving you're human. But what
about flipping it? Instead of humans proving
they're human, what if the bots had to prove
they're bots? That's the other side of the coin.
Proof of bot. And yeah, it's a really interesting
alternative. Cloudflare, they handle a huge chunk
of internet traffic. They actually rolled out
a system for AI agents to basically declare themselves,
hi, I'm a bot. Oh, really? How's that going down?
Well, one agent company, Prowzer Base, they already
support it. So some are playing ball. But it's
super controversial. Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator,
he like flat out called it an axis of evil. Wow.
Strong words. Why such a strong reaction? The
main worry is that it breaks the whole spirit
of the open internet. It could create these powerful
gatekeepers, right? Cloudflare, whoever runs
these systems, gets to decide which bots are
good and which are bad. Right. Who makes that
call? That's a lot of centralized power. Exactly.
It's a major sticking point. So if the main public
internet gets... Well, noisier, more fragmented,
full of bots. Where do you think people, actual
humans are gonna go? Where will we find those
real human connections? My feeling is that humans
will naturally seek out, let's call them digital
oases. More private, maybe curated spaces. Like
gated communities online. Sort of, yeah. Social
media might fragment more you could see more
paid forums private discord slack servers Maybe
even a comeback for personal newsletters and
blogs, you know quality over quantity platforms
like medium or sub stack They seem perfectly
set up for this places offering high quality.
Maybe longer form stuff away from all the noise
It's like moving from the chaotic town square
into smaller quieter cafes where you know the
regulars. Mm -hmm So looking at all these paths
proving we're human making bots identify themselves,
retreating into these digital oases. Is there
one that seems, I don't know, most aligned with
keeping that genuine human connection alive online?
Honestly, each one has pretty big trade -offs.
It's always going to be a balance between open
access, privacy, and who holds the control. There's
no easy answer there. OK, so let's try and bring
this all together. What's the big picture for
us, the people using this network every day,
this dead internet theory? It sounds grim, but
it feels like it's not just a future prediction
anymore. In many ways, it kind of feels spot
on right now. The internet does feel different,
sometimes broken. Less about finding unique voices,
more about wading through an echo chamber. I
think that's fair. Yeah. We've seen the numbers
and the insane bot traffic. We've talked about
how content is becoming more uniform because
of how AI learns. And we've touched on how the
basic economics of the online world are shifting
under our feet. The real struggle I think is
how do we preserve I don't know, the soul of
the internet. How do we make sure we can still
find and value that real human connection if
it's all the machine noise? It's definitely not
about killing AI. That's impossible. It's about
building new systems, finding new norms so humans
can thrive alongside these incredibly powerful
new tools. That leaves us with a pretty big thought,
doesn't it? If our digital world is increasingly
becoming a conversation between machines, what
actually happens to our voices? are authentic
human voices? How do we make sure they don't
just get lost in the noise? How do we ensure
they're heard, and maybe more importantly, valued
as something distinct from all the synthetic
stuff? It's a huge question. And honestly, it's
something for all of us to really think about
as we figure out how to navigate this evolving
landscape. Well, thank you for joining us on
this really fascinating deep dive today. My pleasure.
Until next time, keep exploring, and definitely
keep questioning. Outtifro Music.