I was catching up with a mate yesterday who was venting to me about managing a challenging relationship. Mid-conversation, he got a loaded text from his partner about not being mindful enough of her needs. Without missing a beat, he screenshotted it into ChatGPT and asked it to write a response. This was while I was sitting right in front of him. My actual, imperfectly human advice were taken on as initial feedback, and he ultimately used ChatGPT to come up with a polished response worthy of sending back.
It sounds absurd, but this kind of thing is far more common than you’d think. AI has quietly moved from tidying up work emails to shaping how people actually communicate with the people they love. Every Google search now runs through AI. Your social feed is put together by an algorithm that knows your location, friendships, and social media habits. This issue, when work emails are essentially one AI replying to another, are part of a wider issue, and it has a name: the Dead Internet Theory.
The theory claims much of the internet’s content and activity, posts, comments, even entire accounts, is now generated by bots and AI rather than real people, creating an illusion of human activity that isn’t really there. It started as a fringe forum idea, but the numbers have caught up to it. Cloudflare says bots now generate over half of all web traffic, and AI agents that actually click, browse, and fill out forms grew nearly 8,000 percent in the past year alone. One estimate suggests 57 percent of written content online is now AI-generated in some form.
There was one small win for the humans, though. In July, Go grandmaster Shin Jin-seo became the first person to beat the world’s top AI Go engine in an official series, a three-hour, 221-move game, a full decade after AI first proved it could outplay us.
We’re stuck in a very inception-like chicken and egg game, where we keep trying to make AI sound and seem more human, and it keeps getting better at the job than we are, and so we end up comparing ourselves to it even more. My mate’s text was a small, ordinary example of that loop closing. If we outsource the awkward, honest parts of being human to a machine because it phrases things better, then what was ever the point of writing to each other in the first place?
