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.

T erence Broad Creative Computing Institute University of the Arts London United Kingdom t.broad@arts.ac.uk Abstract The dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory that states that all interactions and posts on social media are no longer being made by real people, but rather by autonomous bots. While the theory is obviously not true, an increasing amount of posts on social media have been made by bots optimised to gain followers and drive engagement on social media platforms. This paper looks at the recent phenomenon of these bots, analysing their behaviour through the lens of computational creativity to investigate the question: is computational creativity flourishing on the dead internet? Introduction The dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory that emerged in the late 2010's or early 2020's that states that large parts of the internet, in particular on social media are no longer occupied by humans and human generated content, but rather posts by AI-driven bots that are designed to control or influence human behaviour (IlluminatiPirate 2021). Whist the theory emerges from the fringes of the internet, stemming in conspiratorial thinking as a way of explaining broad-based changes to society from nefarious actors, many commentators have observed that there is a grain of truth to the theory (Tiffany 2021).