empty content, empty profiles, artificial intelligence, and monetization of the internet
some of you may have heard of the dead internet theory.
it is a theory that states that most of the internet is run by bots, and not actual users.
you can see it in:
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twitter/x posts by meme accounts or accounts that share "cool" things to watch
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the replies to the tweets. for some reason there's always a bunch of stupid bots posting videos to garner impressions. if not those fucking bots, it's the OF girls just spamming the picture of their pussy online to entice impressionable young men and perpetual gooners to click on their link and sub to their OF
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instagram posts, mostly meme accounts as well, or any account that's just posting generic shit like #travel #alphamindset (fuck these dudes). the comment sections are also filled with comments dick riding the OP and glazing the OP
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blog posts. because SEO. many blog posts you see that discuss the news, or anything in regards to the zeitgeist are just regurgitating posts written by another AI/bot which also scraped the post from another site. if you go far enough down the rabbit hole of who copied who, maybe you'll find a human poster. maybe you'll find an AI who has been fed something along the lines of "make new post of x type of news from articles you find online every 2 days"
there's a bunch of other examples you can find online.
the internet has always been the one place where people can share ideas, learn new information, and basically communicate with societies unlike their own, or from across the globe via different platforms
unfortunately, many of these platforms are now infested like never before with bots vying to garner brownie points with netizens
if you are terminally online like i am, you'd have realised that a growing number, maybe even the majority of posts on blogs, and social media platforms, even the comment sections of the posts are by bots.
now this isn't a new thing, the internet has never been free of bots, and it has always been plagued by bots
like WoW bots farming gold by mindlessly killing mobs or fishing, etc. since almost the inception of the game
or open a port on your pc to the wider area network and see how many bot attacks you receive (DON'T DO THIS)
why is this happening
well, it's because getting internet attention literally pays.
why spend time writing a blog post about why the movie "deadpool & wolverine" is awesome, when we can just prompt an AI which can scrape reviews and string together enough words to form a blog post?
and can you afford to have someone manually glaze you over your post everytime you post on instagram? as a content creator, you're posting every hour, who has the time for that?!
or can you afford to spend time all day on twitter to reply to tweets with pictures of your pussy? ofc not, you have to make more content with your rose toy for the gooner bros.
the more clicks you get, the more money you make from whatever content you're selling. whether it's ads on your blogs, or subscription to your monthly body art newsletter
why has it gotten worse?
AI
generative AI has made it easier to come up with content for people writing blogs, social media, or email campaigns. even if you know how to build a bot prior to the widespread use of AI, coming up with the content was difficult and oftentimes a manual process. since 2023, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI models have helped ease this burden for botters, and exarcebated the infestation of the bots
you can even find AI influencers on social media.
accounts posting midjourney art, AI generated boobies, AI generated jokes. and they have followers (most of which are bots like them) which advertisers loooooove.
the craziest thing is that a lot of the times you can't even tell the difference between AI and humans anymore
monetization
almost anything you do nowadays can get you monetized. if you pump enough of it out, and garner enough people to come click on your post, and watch the money roll in as advertisers slide into your dms
you clicking on a post raises their engagement numbers, which makes creators more appealing to advertisers.
the easiest almost sure-fire way to do that is just by constantly pumping out content. shit content, recycled content, any content about a funny post from twitter can be recycled and posted on instagram, any funny post from instagram can be recycled and posted on twitter, these bots will just keep churning shit until it's dry. oftentimes these recycled posts are by actual content creators, so these bots are just outright fucking stealing content and labeling theirs.
but whatever, right? cat funny haha. now keep pumping out cute kitty pictures >:(
what can we do?
well, media literacy, pursuing your hobbies and just posting them online helps (i think).
media literacy is often taught in schools, in humanities classes such as social studies, geography, and history. these classes help us understand how to criticize media, understand its source, the source's biases, the objective of the media.
pursuing your hobbies and sharing them online helps in generating genuine content. i'd suggest posting them on your own websites so that the social media overlords can't use your content for their AI, and other botters on the platform also can't access your content for AI. Maybe throw in a few things on your blog to make it unfriendly to advertisers and AIs.
some people say that the internet will be 90% filled with AI generated content in a couple of years.
i think it's okay. i will still be here, i will still link my site to other sites with real human webmasters. at the very least, this corner of the interwebz can be bot-free.