Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, has suggested that there might be some truth in the “dead internet theory”.
The idea is a conspiracy theory that the majority of content and apparent people online are actually being automatically generated by computers, and that the internet is for the most part “dead”.
While it has often been debunked, the wide spread of artificial intelligence systems in recent years as well as failed attempts at crackdowns on bots on platforms such as X, formerly known as Twitter, mean that it has been given increasing credence.
And now Mr Altman has suggested that despite his having previously disbelieved the theory, there may be some truth in it.
“i never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now,” he wrote.
LLMs, or large language models, are the technology that underpins ChatGPT as well as other similar offerings such as Anthropic’s Claude.
That led to an outcry in response to his statement, from users who suggested that his role at the top of OpenAI had directly contributed to the problem he was warning about.
The release of ChatGPT to the public in late 2022 led to a flurry of other similar systems being made available online, and made it much easier for both genuine and malicious users to automatically generate content and posts for online platforms.
Others also suggested that Mr Altman’s tweet could be informed by his work on the World Network, which was previously known as Worldcoin and which he founded in 2019. That company says that it is aiming to make a way for humans to prove their real identity online, by scanning their eyes, which has been promoted as a way of stopping the influence of AI-powered systems online.
