Bots, AI Slop, and the Disappearing Realness of the Internet
This story was originally published in Vol 5 of Patta Magazine, with added links.
On October 29, 1969, the first message was successfully sent over the ARPANET, a rudimentary computer network that would eventually evolve into the Internet. Using a computer roughly the size of a bedroom, a professor of computer science at UCLA was attempting to send a transmission to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. The intended message was “Login,” but the system crashed as soon as the second letter was entered. As a result, the abbreviated phrase “Lo” cemented its place in history as the first internet communication.
Since that fateful communication, most online content has been made by humans, between humans, and for humans. Emails, internet forums, blogs, and later social media created an interconnected world that pre-Internet societies could never have imagined. For decades, this digital frontier was defined by human creativity, experimentation, and conversation. It gave rise to DIY forums, niche subcultures, open-source collaboration, and a sense of raw, often chaotic vitality. But in recent years, something feels different.
Attack of the Fembots
In 2016, the world’s first CGI influencer was born. A freckled, Brazilian-American teenager named Lil Miquela appeared on Instagram with a strangely convincing human look. At first glance, she seemed like any other fashion-forward teen online. But soon, it became clear she wasn’t real. Miquela, powered by a startup and rendered entirely in 3D, started showing up in global fashion campaigns, including one for Prada, and even starred in a Calvin Klein ad where she was shown kissing Bella Hadid. Her feed today includes collaborations with brands like BMW and selfies with artists like Rosalia. The strange part? None of it is real, yet millions engage with her as if she were.
Lil Miquela is not just a marketing stunt, but a harbinger of something larger. Since her debut, the internet has seen a surge in low-quality, high-volume content created by AI and bots. Spammy TikToks using AI voiceovers, auto-generated YouTube videos, fake product reviews, and influencer personas with no clear origin are just the beginning. The once-vibrant digital ecosystem is being overwhelmed by synthetic content that mimics human presence without actually involving humans.
This shift has given rise to a controversial idea known as the Dead Internet Theory. According to its proponents, a growing portion of the internet is no longer driven by human interaction but instead by algorithms, bots, and artificial intelligence. These systems generate content, replicate engagement, and simulate community, creating the illusion of a busy, thriving internet that is, in fact, largely automated. Linguist Adam Aleksic, better known as Etymology Nerd, sums it up by saying, “Users are left to consume distractions devoid of meaning, surrounded by an ecosystem of bots that create the illusion of social connectivity.”
The Rise of AI “Slop” Content
The effects of this phenomenon are already being felt. Authenticity becomes harder to identify. YouTube is flooded with channels that combine AI-written scripts, text-to-speech narration, and stock footage, creating endless streams of synthetic “content” that no human ever touched. Even articles on major platforms are sometimes written by AI to rank in search engines, with minimal editorial oversight. Spotify is quietly filling mood-based playlists like “Peaceful Piano” with AI-generated playlists released under fake artist names. One such example is The Velvet Sundown, an entirely AI-generated band with almost one million monthly listeners, which was created to mimic indie rock, complete with fabricated backstories and promotional imagery. After gaining popularity, the band’s Spotify biography was updated with the admission, “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
All of this contributes to a flattening of taste. Content created by machines tends to be bland, repetitive, and risk-averse. Algorithms optimize for engagement, not for meaning. The result is an aesthetic monoculture where everything looks the same, sounds the same, and feels the same. AI can replicate trends, but it struggles with subversion, irony, cultural nuance, or especially the inherent bizarreness of humans. It can’t capture the strange, uncomfortable, or deeply personal flavors that human creators bring to their work.
This growing uniformity is not just a tech issue, it’s a cultural one. The early internet thrived on chaos, experimentation, and the unexpected. Weird blogs, glitchy Flash games, absurd memes, and earnest message board rants formed the backbone of digital culture. Today, those weird edges are being sanded down. The platforms are cleaner, the content is more polished, and the voices are less distinct. It’s not that people aren’t still making things; they are, but their work is increasingly drowned out by noise.
AI-generated content is on the rise, especially since the advent of publicly available AI tools. In response to this, Indiana University Professor of Informatics and Computer Science Filippo Menczer was part of a team that developed the tool Botometer to help people spot fake accounts. Using a machine-learning algorithm, the tool rates how likely a Twitter account is to be a bot.
Menczer describes the bot “arms race” by saying “Social bots have become harder to detect, and machine learning algorithms have also become more sophisticated. Our research shows that many social bots now have fake profiles, images, and posts that are generated by AI models.” Ultimately, the harmful consequences of bots can be quite serious. “An uninformed public is easier to manipulate. This causes obvious harms in key areas” like creativity, and even democracy at large.
For those who want to test their ability to sniff out bots, a game-inspired tool called Human or Not? asks users if they were talking with a fellow human or an AI bot, following a two-minute conversation.
The Faltering Cultural Hegemony of the Internet
That noise leads us to a kind of digital fatigue. Internet users could risk feeling disengaged or anxious while browsing. Social media feels less like a conversation and more like a slot machine. The dopamine hits are shorter. The feeds are busier but emptier. In its most extreme form, this is what the Dead Internet Theory is pointing to: not just that parts of the internet are automated, but that its very spirit feels hollow.
It’s no wonder, then, that people are seeking alternatives. In the face of synthetic saturation, there’s a growing movement toward the tangible, the analog, and the real. Zines are making a comeback. Vinyl record sales are at their highest in decades. Film photography, with its imperfections and physicality, is booming among younger generations. Independent bookstores, print magazines, and DIY art shows are all seeing renewed interest. Stick-and-poke tattoo artist and printmaker Chloe Gilson speaks on the rise of analog creativity by saying, “Digital makes everything too perfect. The imperfections in handmade art are what make human creativity so pure and unique. With tattoos and prints, I love being able to see imperfections. With a digital platform, anything can be repeated or edited to perfection.”
Even outdoor culture, camping, hiking, and skating, is still experiencing a resurgence as people look to reconnect with grounded experiences. The slang “touching grass” has emerged to describe unplugging and spending time outside or IRL.
This mirrors what happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. When lockdowns forced people indoors and online, many responded by going outside. Parks filled up. Hiking became trendy. Nature felt like a sanctuary from screens. The same instinct is happening now, not as a response to a virus, but to an environment that feels synthetic and overstimulating.
In the same way, digital creators are also pivoting. Artists are foregrounding their process, sharing behind-the-scenes work to prove it’s made by a real person. Musicians are leaning into imperfection and rawness. Niche communities are forming on smaller, less commercial platforms. There’s a hunger for culture that feels lived-in, not manufactured. Something you can touch.
Whether or not the internet is truly “dead” in the way the theory describes is up for debate. But what’s undeniable is the shift in how it feels. The web once promised endless discovery, a place where anyone could post, share, and shape the world. That promise still exists, but it’s harder to find beneath the surface noise.
The Dead Internet Theory is not really about proving that bots have taken over. It’s about recognizing the unease that comes from no longer knowing who or what we’re interacting with. It’s about prioritizing authentic connection in a space that increasingly feels synthetic. And it’s about the creative, human response, not to log off entirely, but to make something real, against the current.
