AI will fall into a death spiral if it doesn’t get fresh content, fast. AI models have made content creation a fool’s errand because they steal the content from the authors without giving credit. Problem is, if the AI has no new content to train it, it quickly spirals into being terrible (paper).
When AI began routing traffic away from websites and keeping it within the chat window, people stopped creating written content, and flocked to short form video instead. Creators moved to platforms where AI could not access their content. Instagram threatened to start training on content created within the platform and users revolted. They walked it back.
This isn’t just an AI problem. For years, Google has been slowly pulling back the traffic it sends to creators and businesses who make content for the web. They’ve increasingly shown ads at the top of the page, snippets, and now AI overviews. With each successive change, less traffic is routed to websites, and more to itself.
AI makes this problem worse because no traffic gets out, everything stays within the chat. But a breaking point will be reached if we cannot find an equilibrium to incentivize people to make fresh content for the AI to train on. AI has already consumed everything ever created in history, and it needs something new. But without a proper attribution and traffic routing system, people have no reason to make content.
This is where dead internet theory comes to play. If everything is AI, and it’s just bots serving bots, it spirals into nothingness.
