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The increase of artificial intelligence (AI) has saturated our lives in manners that stretch beyond digital helpers such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Generative AI isn’t solely upsetting how digital content gets made, but it’s initiating to sway how the internet caters to us.
Enhanced access to large language models (LLMs) and AI instruments has additionally propelled the dead internet conspiracy concept. This notion, proposed in the start of the 2020s, implied that the internet is essentially controlled by AIs conversing with and yielding content for other AIs — with information produced and spread by humans existing as a rarity.
When Live Science scrutinized the concept, we gathered that this occurrence has yet to materialize in the tangible realm. Yet people currently progressively mingle with bots — and one should never presume an online interaction involves another human being.
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Beyond this, low-caliber content — spanning from articles and images, to videos and social media posts fashioned by instruments such as Sora, ChatGPT and others — is prompting a surge in “AI slop.” It can range from Instagram Reels displaying videos of felines executing instruments or employing weapons, to spurious or fictional information being presented as news or truth. This has been supported, partially, by a desire for increased online content to encourage clicks, capture awareness of websites and elevate their visibility in search engines.
“The predicament is that a blend of the aspiration toward search engine optimization [SEO] and catering to social media algorithms has steered toward increased content and diminished grade content. Content that’s set to harness our attention economy (serving ads, etc.) has transformed into the main manner information gets served up,” Adam Nemeroff, assistant provost for Innovations in Learning, Teaching, and Technology at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, imparted to Live Science. “AI slop and other AI-generated content is frequently occupying those spaces currently.”
Social media platforms such as Instagram might regularly host subpar AI-generated content.
Skepticism of information on the internet isn’t new, with numerous spurious assertions made by individuals possessing particular motives, or merely a wish to induce disruption or outrage. Yet AI instruments have hastened the tempo at which machine-generated information, images or data can proliferate.
SEO firm Graphite uncovered in November 2024 that the quantity of AI-generated articles being published had exceeded the quantity of human-composed articles. Although 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were still composed by individuals, versus 14% by AI (with an analogous split discovered in the information a chatbot served up), it still points toward a surge in AI-produced content. Citing a report that one in 10 of the swiftest-developing YouTube channels displays AI-generated content exclusively, Nemeroff appended that AI slop is initiating to negatively influence us.
“AI slop is actively displacing creators who derive their livelihood from online content,” he elucidated. “Publications such as Clarkesworld magazine had to cease taking submissions entirely due to the inundation of AI-generated writing, and even Wikipedia is coping with AI-generated content that strains its community moderation system, positioning a key information resource in danger.”
While an increase in AI content renders individuals more to consume, it also deteriorates faith in information, particularly as generative AI gets superior at serving up images and videos that seem genuine or information that seems human-composed. As such, there could be a scenario where a profounder skepticism in information, notably in media brands and news, steers to human-composed content being perceived as spurious and AI-produced.
“I consistently advocate presuming content is AI-generated and seeking confirmation that it’s not. It’s additionally a superb moment to procure the media we anticipate and to bolster creators and outlets that possess explicit editorial and creative guidelines,” stated Nemeroff.
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Trust versus the attention economy
There exist two facets to AI-generated content when it pertains to the perspective of trust.
The initial involves AI disseminating convincing information that mandates an element of informed pondering to verify and not adopt at face value. Yet the open essence of the web signifies it’s consistently been straightforward for inaccurate information to circulate, whether accidentally or deliberately, and there’s protracted been a necessity to possess a sound skepticism or yearning to cross-reference information before leaping to conclusions.
“Information literacy has continuously been core to the experience of employing the web, and it’s all the more pivotal and nuanced currently with the introduction of AI content and other misinformation,” voiced Nemeroff.
The subsequent facet of AI-generated content involves when it’s deliberately utilized to absorb attention, even if its viewers can effortlessly discern it’s fabricated. One instance, as flagged by Nemeroff, constitutes of images of a displaced child with a puppy in the repercussions of Hurricane Helene, which was utilized to disseminate political misinformation.
Although the images were swiftly flagged as AI-produced, they still provoked reactions, therefore energizing their impact. Even manifestly AI-produced content can be either weaponized for political motivations or utilized to seize the precious attention of individuals on the open web or within social media platforms.
“AI content that is brighter, louder and more captivating than reality, and which draws in human attention like a vortex … engenders a “Siren” effect where AI companions or entertainment feeds are more alluring than muddled, friction-filled, and occasionally underwhelming human interactions.” Nell Watson, an IEEE member and AI ethics engineer at Singularity University, shared with Live Science.
There are concerns that the AIs of the prospect will be propelled by synthetic content generated by other AIs, steering to an overarching detachment from reality.
While some AI content might seem refined and captivating, it might epitomize a net negative for the manner we utilize the internet, compelling us to question if what’s being viewed is real, and to cope with an inundation of inexpensive, synthetic content.
“AI slop is the digital parallel of plastic contamination in the ocean. It congests the ecosystem, rendering it harder to traverse and degrading the experience for everyone. The immediate effect is authenticity exhaustion,” Watson explained. “Trust is swiftly transforming into the most invaluable currency online.”
There’s a flipside to this. The rise of inauthentic content could be counterbalanced by individuals being drawn to content that’s explicitly human-produced; we could witness superior-verified information and “artisanal” content fashioned by real individuals. Whether that’s delivered by some form of watermark or secured off behind paywalls and in gated communities on Discord or other forums, remains to be witnessed. It’s hinged on how individuals react to AI slop, and their burgeoning awareness of such content, that will ascertain the configuration of content in the prospect and how it eventually affects individuals, Nemeroff stated.
“If individuals discover slop and communicate that slop isn’t acceptable, people’s consumer behaviors will additionally shift with that,” he stated. “This, coupled with our broader media diet, will hopefully steer individuals to make shifts to the nutrition of what they consume and how they approach it.”
Less surfing, more sifting the web
AI-produced content is merely one segment of how AI is altering the manner that we employ the internet. LLM-based agents already come constructed into the latest smartphones, for example. You’d additionally be hard-pressed to discover anyone who hasn’t indirectly encountered generative AI, whether it was serving up information suggestions or proffering the option to rework an email, generating an emoji or automatically editing a photo.
While Live Science’s publisher possesses stringent rules on AI utilization (it certainly can’t be utilized for writing or editing articles), some AI instruments can assist with mundane image-editing tasks, such as positioning images on new backgrounds.
AI utilization, in other words, is inescapable in 2025. Contingent on how we utilize it, it can sway how we communicate and socialize online — but more pertinently, it’s affecting how we seek and absorb information.
Google Search, for example, currently has an AI overview serving up aggregated and disseminated information prior to external search results — something which a recently introduced AI Mode builds upon.
“We primarily utilized the internet via web addresses and search up to this moment. AI is the initial innovation to disrupt that segment of the cycle,” Nemeroff appends. “AI chat instruments are increasingly taking up internet queries that previously directed individuals to websites. Search engines that once handled questions and answers are currently sharing that space with search-enabled chatbots and, more recently, AI agent browsers such as Comet, Atlas, Dia, and others.”
On a surface level, this is shifting the manner individuals search and consume information. Even if someone types a query into a traditional search bar, it’s increasingly common that an AI-produced summary will pop up rather than a list of websites from trusted sources.
“We are transitioning from an internet designed for human eyeballs to an internet designed for AI agents,” Watson stated. “There is a shift toward “Agentic workflows.” Soon, you generally won’t surf the web to book a flight or research a product yourself; your personal AI agent will negotiate with travel sites or summarize reviews for you. The web becomes a database for machines rather than a library for people.”
There are two probable effects of this. The initial constitutes less human traffic to websites such as Live Science, as AI agents scrape the information they feel a user desires — disrupting the advertising-led funding model of numerous websites.
“If an AI reads the website for you, you don’t see the ads, which forces publishers to put up paywalls or block AI scrapers entirely, further fracturing the information ecosystem,” stated Watson. This fracturing could even witness websites shutting down, given the already tumultuous state of online media, further steering to a reduction in trusted sources of information.
The subsequent constitutes a situation where AI agents wind up searching, ingesting and learning from AI-generated content.
“As the web fills with synthetic content — AI slop — future models train on that synthetic data, leading to a degradation of quality and a detachment from reality,” Watson stated. Slop or solid information, this all plays into the dead internet theory of machines interacting with other machines, rather than humans.
“Socially, this risks isolating us,” Watson appended. “If an AI companion is always available, always agrees with you, and never has a bad day, real human relationships feel exhausting by comparison. Information-seeking will shift from ’Googling’ — which relies on the user to filter truth from fiction — to relying on trusted AI curators. However, this centralises power; we are handing our critical thinking over to the algorithms that summarise the world for us.”
It’s the end of the internet as we know it… and AI feels fine
Undoubtedly, the manners in which humans are employing the internet, and the World Wide Web it supports, have been altered by AI. AI has affected every aspect of internet utilization in 2025, from how we search for information, to how content gets generated and how we are served the information we asked for. Even if you choose to search the web without any AI instruments, the information you see could have been produced or handled by some form of AI.
As we’re currently amidst this change, it’s hard to be clear on what exactly the internet will resemble as the trend continues. When asked about whether AI could transform the internet into a “ghost town,” Watson countered: “It won’t be so much a ghost town as a zombie apocalypse.”
It’s hard not to be concerned by this damning assessment, whether you’re a content creator directly affected by AI or simply an end user who’s getting tired of questioning information.
However, Nemeroff highlighted that we can learn from the rise of social media and its impact on the internet in the late 2000s. It serves as an example of the disruption and challenges that such platforms faced when it comes to the utilization and spread of information.
“Taking a few pages out of what we learned about social media, these technologies were not without harms, and we also did not anticipate a number of the issues that emerged at the beginning,” he stated. “There is a role for responsible regulation as part of that, which requires lawmakers to have an interest in regulating these tools and knowing how to regulate in an ongoing way.”
When it comes to any new technology — self-driving cars being one example — regulation and lawmaking are often several steps behind the breakthroughs and adoption.
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It’s also worth bearing in mind that while AI poses a challenge, the agentic instruments it proffers can also superiorly surface information that might otherwise remain buried deep in search results or online archives — thereby assisting uncover information from sources that might not have prospered in the age of SEO.
The manner humans react to AI content on the internet will likely govern how it evolves, potentially bursting an AI bubble by retreating to human-only enclaves on the web or mandating a higher level of trust signals from both human- and AI-produced content.
“We find ourselves in a really challenging moment with this,” concluded Nemeroff. “Being familiar with the environment and knowing its presence there is a key point to both changing the incentives around this as well as communicating what we value to the platforms that distribute it. I think we will start to see more examples of showing the provenance of higher quality content and people investing in that.”
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