Dead Internet Theory Confirmed: Over 50% Of Traffic In 2025 Was Artificial, 37% Of Comments Were Bots. Experts Predict 90% Of Content Will Be AI In 2026
“For the first time in a decade, automated traffic has surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic," the report found.
The internet as we know it is dying, or otherwise might be dead already according to some. We have all begun to notice that content and comments online are increasingly fake, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, to the point where it feels as if the internet has become less organic with real people participating on the other end.
In such a short time the majority of the internet has become “AI-generated slime” and garbage, regurgitated content and conversations that were not made from an actual person. This problem has gotten so pervasive and in everyone’s faces many are starting to wonder and believe if what is known as the “dead internet theory” is truly coming to pass, and if it’s a matter of time when this is fully actualized.
The dead internet theory was posited years ago by netizens in forums who believe that the internet is quickly being replaced by bots, and is run and controlled by artificial intelligence. The theory further alleges that the internet died in 2016 and that what the world has now is really being run by the U.S. government, and basically everything people are encountering and interacting with is just AI-generated content.
But this “theory” is quickly becoming a fact, as the rate at which AI is taking over the internet and finding its way into everyday life and interactions is becoming harder to ignore – that is, if people even realize they are consuming AI-generated content and bot traffic.
Futurism reported in January last year that close to 60% of the internet already consists of internet slime, scraped from the recesses of the world wide web and is rapidly being copied by AI algorithms, which therefore has given the dead internet theory some credit.
The tech outlet reported:
The internet’s steady fall into the AI-garbled dumpster continues. As Vice reports, a recent study conducted by researchers at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI Lab found that a “shocking amount of the web” is already made up of poor-quality AI-generated and translated content.
The paper is yet to be peer-reviewed, but “shocking” feels like the right word. According to the study, over half — specifically, 57.1 percent — of all of the sentences on the internet have been translated into two or more other languages. The poor quality and staggering scale of these translations suggest that large language model (LLM) -powered AI models were used to both create and translate the material. The phenomenon is especially prominent in “lower-resource languages,” or languages with less readily available data with which to more effectively train AI models.
In other words, in what the researchers believe to be a ploy to garner clickbait-driven ad revenue, AI is being used to first generate poor-quality English-language content at a remarkable scale, and then AI-powered machine translation (MT) tools transcribe said content into several other languages. The translated material gets worse each time — and as a result, entire regions of the web are filling to the brim with degrading AI-scrambled copies of copies.
“Machine-generated, multi-way parallel translations not only dominate the total amount of translated content on the web in lower-resource languages,” the AWS researchers write in the paper, “it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages.”‘
In April, a new report reaffirmed that the internet is dying and is becoming incredibly artificial.
Imperva, a Thales Company, revealed in its 2025 Bad Bot Report that over half of all internet traffic was automated, and a little less than two/fifths of comments were bots in 2024.
“Automated threats are rising at an unprecedented rate, with bad bots now making up 37% of all internet traffic. AI is not only being used by attackers to create more advanced, evasive bots that target APIs, exploit business logic, and fuel fraud, but it is also lowering the barrier to entry for attackers resulting in an increase in volumes of simple bot attacks.
“For the first time in a decade, automated traffic has surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic. Businesses must adapt their security strategies to keep pace with these increasingly sophisticated threats.”
Bot traffic in 2023 was 32%, the report noted.
“Both the Travel and the Retail sectors face an advanced bot problem, with bad bots making up 41% and 59% of their traffic respectively. In 2024, the travel industry became the most attacked sector, accounting for 27% of all bot attacks, up from 21% in 2023.
“The most notable shift in 2024 is the decline in advanced bot attacks targeting the travel industry (41%, down from 61% in 2023) and the sharp increase in simple bot attacks (52%, up from 34%).
“This shift indicates that AI-powered automation tools have lowered the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing less sophisticated actors to initiate more basic bot attacks. Rather than relying exclusively on sophisticated techniques, cybercriminals are increasingly utilizing high volumes of simpler bots to inundate travel sites, resulting in more frequent and widespread attacks.
“According to the Imperva Threat Research team, widely used AI tools are being leveraged for cyberattacks, with ByteSpider Bot alone responsible for 54% of all AI-enabled attacks. Other significant contributors include AppleBot at 26%, ClaudeBot at 13%, and ChatGPT User Bot at 6%.”
But if you thought the internet was dead or dying already, it will surely only get even worse in the coming years, according to some experts in the space.
In 2022, the European Union’s Europol published a report that argued that by 2026 an astounding 90% of the internet will be AI-generated slop.
"Experts estimate that as much as 90 percent of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026. In most cases, synthetic media is generated for gaming, to improve services or to improve the quality of life, but the increase in synthetic media and improved technology has given rise to disinformation possibilities."
AI expert and adviser Nina Schick told Yahoo! Finance something similar in 2023.
"I think we might reach 90% of online content generated by AI by 2025, so this technology is exponential. I believe that the majority of digital content is going to start to be produced by AI. You see ChatGPT... but there are a whole plethora of other platforms and applications that are coming up.
"ChatGPT has really captured the public imagination in an extremely compelling way, but I think in a few months' time, ChatGPT is just going to be seen as another tool powered by this new form of AI, known as generative AI.
"What generative AI can do, essentially, is create new things that would have thus far been seen as unique to human intelligence or creativity. Generative AI can create across all media, so text, video, audio, pictures – every digital medium can be powered by generative AI.”
Research firm Epoch AI believes that by 2032, or even as early as 2027, AI will have exposed itself to everything in it.
“If chatbots consume all of the available data, and there are no further advances in data efficiency, I would expect to see a relative stagnation in the field,” Pablo Villalobos, the study’s lead author, told Live Science. “Models [will] only improve slowly over time as new algorithmic insights are discovered and new data is naturally produced.”
“If they succeed in doing so, and if the usefulness of private data is comparable to that of public web data, then it’s quite likely that leading AI companies will have more than enough data to last until the end of the decade.
“At that point, other bottlenecks such as power consumption, increasing training costs, and hardware availability might become more pressing than lack of data.”
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Proverbs 6:3 Do this now, my son, and deliver thyself, when thou art come into the hand of thy friend; go, humble thyself, and make sure thy friend. [4] Give not sleep to thine eyes, nor slumber to thine eyelids. [5] Deliver thyself as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand of the fowler.
The internet for a time became a place where people used to escape reality: now some people are escaping the internet to return to reality.
Indeed, the internet is dead. Social media has been overrun with AI bots that are increasingly getting better at forming coherent sentences, as the bots scrape the internet and regurgitate previous opinions and recycle whatever LLMs have collected. Remember: these LLMs are mostly grabbing information from places such as Reddit, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, etc.
Ecclesiastes 9:3 This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. [4] For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.
I am going to coin a new term, and you are welcome to use it too as I am going start saying more often:
What we are witnessing is “late-stage atheism.” There is no creativity, no labor, no accountability, no mortality, no wisdom, no understanding, no beliefs: just a sterile nightmare, slaves of their own oppression. This is the end result of atheism: nihilism and apathy. Self-consuming, cannibalization, a blackhole where things go to die. AI agents and AI robotics with personality traits are the epitome of this. It started out with “peace, love, and drugs,” tolerance, empowerment, inclusivity and equity; cooperation and coexistence, etc. Now we have what we have now.
It’s all just dead and it feels dead. You walk outside and people are the walking dead, zombies without a hope or prayer, unknowingly that they are dead, though truthfully many people too know they are dead put choose to stay dead;
And then you go online, and at least for a while it was an option to connect with other like-minded people and spread truth there. But that is fading away now with all this mass-censorship and surveillance. If the content or the user has not already been banned, you and anything remotely truthful will be shadow banned into oblivion, and drowned out by artificial bots and slop content, as industry plants and big business are tirelessly shoved down people’s throats.
Now we are forced to sift through the crumbs and pan for specs of gold to find anything decent or truthful.
Isaiah 59:14 And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.
I’ve said before that our days online are limited, not just because of censorship, but for our own sanity because everything is becoming fake and vexing beyond measure.
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On one of his missionary journeys, the apostle Paul visited Athens, Greece, where he said he witnessed “the city wholly given to idolatry,” and who were “too superstitious” and worshipped a plurality of gods and deities, though the people acknowledged that there was still one God above all that was a mystery to them. When questioned by the philosophers …
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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We need to treat A.I. like a deadly evil device, and by all means : DO NOT USE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's of Satan.
I guess I was naive 45 years ago thinking the internet would be this great big library in the sky
It could have been that if peoples intentions were not always geared to money, drama, wars, egos etc