429: The Dead Internet Theory: Are We Building Machines That Only Talk to Other Machines?

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. So I saw something on LinkedIn the other day that stopped me, like, mid scroll. It was a clearly AI written post. I could tell from the cadence, from the phrasing that was slightly off. It was super generic inspirational, the tone of it and everything. And underneath it were dozens of comments, super enthusiastic comments, supportive comments and every single one of them was also AI generated. Bots responding to bots. It was horrible. A whole conversation happened there and not a single human being was involved at all. Just machines. Every part of that exchange, though, was designed to look like it came from a real person. And I find them quite tragic and hilarious at the same time. Tragic because deep inside of me is this wish for interactions, to be genuine and authentic, things between people, exchange between real human beings. And hilarious because having lived through the development of these automated systems and having participated in using these systems myself to get what I needed, I kinda realized that we are responsible for this kind of stuff to exist. This is what people call the dead Internet theory, if you look at it from, like, the outside perspective. Right? Just machines talking to machines. And I think it is worth talking about because we as software founders and as entrepreneurs in this space, we're quite likely to use AI tools to build our businesses. The output of these tools now becomes often quite AI generated or has a lot of AI generated content or components, AI generated data or AI augmented data if you wanna call it that. So in some way, at the very least, we might be contributing to a network that is increasingly filled by AI systems talking to other AI systems with AI content. A quick word from our sponsor here, paddle.com. I use Paddle as my merchant of record for all my software projects, and they take care of taxes, currencies, all that kind of stuff so I can focus on dealing with my users and my competitors. So if you would rather just build your product instead of dealing with all these other things, check out paddle.com as your payment provider and merchant of record. Now the dead Internet theory isn't about the useful kind of machine to machine communication that we have, like APIs or remote procedure calls if you live in the nineties or systems that are supposed to interface with other systems just to fetch data, push data, create actions for us. All of that is fine. That's what machines are built to do. So what we're seeing now is something different though. It's machines creating content that pretends to be human being engaged with by other machines that are also pretending to be human. And LinkedIn is the worst for this. Twitter is not far behind though, but whole conversations there are happening where not a …