What to Know About the'Dead Internet' Theory--and Why It's Spreading Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 at Moscone Center on June 02, 2025 in San Francisco, California. Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 at Moscone Center on June 02, 2025 in San Francisco, California. "i never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now," wrote Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, last week on X in his typical all-lowercase style. Altman, CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, the world's most popular AI text generator, drew irony on X. "You're absolutely right! This observation isn't just smart--it shows you're operating on a higher level," wrote one user, mimicking the sycophantic tone of ChatGPT text.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the years since ChatGPT's debut transformed Silicon Valley into an artificial intelligence hype factory, the internet's most vibrant communities have puzzled over how to adapt to the ensuing deluge of A.I. slop, especially as autogenerated outputs become more sophisticated. Perhaps no platform exemplifies this conundrum better than Reddit, the anonymized message-board network that's been connecting millions of humans across the world for 20 years now--as many users there increasingly wonder whether they are, indeed, still connecting with other humans. Such concerns aren't new, but they've been heightened thanks to a shocking exercise of A.I.-powered manipulation. In late April, the moderation team for the popular subreddit r/ChangeMyView disclosed that researchers from the University of Zurich had conducted an "unauthorized experiment" on community members that "deployed AI-generated comments to study how AI could be used to change views."

Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, the more absurd the better, especially when that conspiracy theory might actually have a kernel of truth in it. The "dead internet theory" that's been making the rounds on social media of late is a perfect example of this sort of thing. So what is this "dead internet theory" anyway? Well, according to this conspiracy theory, at some point in the not too distant past artificial intelligence decided to swap out the "real" internet with a "fake" version that it runs pretty much all by itself. The reason for it having legs, of course, has a lot to do with the massive proliferation of bots that have infested social media platforms like Twitter.