Are we all bots?
I know you are but what am I?
The irony is that, even if we all weren't bots, there's no way spending any time on here has any tangible difference on your life or others involved.
Recollect for a moment all of the postings you may have online, profile or not.
Do, for a moment, consider the weight of difference if all of your messages were deleted, whether private or public.
Whether in a chatroom or an email.
In all likelihood everything you ever written amounted little change to those received.
Even love letters, which mean mostly little due ephemerality and the dulled passion the pixel-eye adopts.
Zap! Your deleted blocks were replaced by another. Maybe with a bit more feeling.
If there is a Dead Internet Theory, its basis ought to be found in the sleepwalkers that make up the internet, not bots.
For what does it profit a man if he peruse the whole Internet but loses his soul?
How would you feel if I were a bot?
Indifferent
Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
The social, mass-manipulation, consumerism part is already a reality. Mass-surveillance and manipulation by the government and private interests already exists. This will get worse. If a tool is at their disposal and furthers their ends, they will use it. If AI-generated content fulfills these criteria -- which I think it does--, it will be used like this.
The technical assertion part is better regarded as a prophecy. AI-generated content will be used more broadly once it gets better, faster, and cheaper. We'll have philosophical "content-creator" zombies. They will be indistinguishable from human content-creators.
You will have software where you enter personality traits, likes, dislikes, topics, and whatnot, and the software will run a Twitter account autonomously: tweets, replies, media, and all. No human required.
Foggots on their smartphones can't figure the web out.
Nothing is new under the sun.
The internet remains ours and we are sorounded by hordes of barbarians who can't understand us.
The WWW, not the internet.