Pieter Levels Ties AI Bots to Dead Internet Theory
AI reply bots on Reddit, Stack Overflow and X leave no fresh human content for training data.
Pieter Levels posted that nobody asks questions on Stack Overflow anymore and that AI reply bots now dominate Reddit and X to promote brands. With no real human content left, he said there is no fresh training data for future models. Levels referenced the Dead Internet Theory. Ryan Hoover replied that AI will become the primary curator for purchase decisions, sometimes without any human in the loop. The posts quote the Wikipedia entry describing the theory as the idea that the internet consists mostly of bot activity and algorithmic curation.
Yesterday me and my friends talked about the Dead Internet Theory If nobody asks questions anymore on Stack Overflow, and sites like Reddit are now taken over by AI reply bots to promote brands, as well as AI reply bots on here, there is no real content anymore on the internet…
Stack Overflow has gone from a peak of 207k questions in march 2014, down to 1.4k in july 2026 end of an era https://twitter.com/DanielLockyer/status/2008128039503478951
Reactions from ranked influencers
4 posts
I do :D
The problem is no one gets paid for creating the content https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/2086056496920506723
AI will be the primary curator for purchase decisions online, sometimes without a human in the loop. For some categories, this is awesome. E.g. choosing which API/data provider can be evaluated entirely by software leading to better decision without laborious test. Budgets can…
Yes but how will the AI get new knowledge? Like imagine the example of a new GoPro camera coming out. It can get the specs from the website but it doesn't know it's good? Website reviews become AI LLM slop It can check video reviews but with SOTA video models like Seedance,…
AI will be the primary curator for purchase decisions online, sometimes without a human in the loop. For some categories, this is awesome. E.g. choosing which API/data provider can be evaluated entirely by software leading to better decision without laborious test. Budgets can…