A Generated Web
The growing dark forest of online experience
The internet was created with this very basic notion that there’s a human being on the other side of the computer screen, and that notion is being replaced.
The dark forest theory of the internet elucidates the consequences of this change. It states that our online experience feels increasingly life-like but lifeless.
Public forums and online spaces are being flooded by slop, bots, trolls, clickbait, and ads. In response, people are running to walled gardens, such as private messaging groups, Discord channels, newsletters, and closed blogs, where interaction is still human.
The theory was first proposed by Yancey Strickler in 2019, two years before we were blessed with ChatGPT. That is to say, LLMs are not the root cause. The internet has simply evolved into a high-stakes environment. Careers, lives, even politics can rise or fall on clicks and likes. It’s a numbers game, and the more optimized and scaled your efforts are, the greater your chances of success.
LLMs did make this a whole lot worse, though. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, thousands of automated pipelines have been set up that publish a relentless stream of LinkedIn hustle manifestos, Twitter rage-bait, Facebook fake news posts, and SEO-optimized corporate blog posts. With current advances in image/video gen models, even YouTube videos, TikTok clips and podcasts can all be automated at the same unprecedented scale.
The dark forest is still young and growing fast.
The Polsia Example
Meet Polsia, a solo-founder startup building an AI system that “runs” your company 24/7. It claims a $10M annual run rate and just raised $30M at a $250M valuation.
For a hundred bucks, it builds and deploys a landing page for your business, runs your social media accounts, and performs mass-scale outreach. There are almost 9000 such projects currently live.
The startup itself runs on this kind of automation. Its Twitter profile, for example, is averaging 5 tweets a MINUTE.
This is the scale of automated output that a single person can produce. It is a preview of the internet that is coming.
In fact, Polsia, spelled backward, is AI SLOP. And given their About Us page is made of adapted lyrics from Giorgio by Daft Punk (which is also running in the background if you have sound turned on), I suspect it is some kind of performative art experiment trying to show just that.
A Pinch of Data
Enough vibes, let’s put some numbers on the dark forest.
To start, since 2022, the percentage of new AI-generated internet articles has blown up from ~10% to over 50% within 24 months.
How about social media? Due to their closed nature, it is difficult to know exactly. We can nevertheless try an indirect approach and look at their reported numbers for invalid ad traffic, which show how many ad clicks come from bots. Take LinkedIn, for example:
The second claim of the dark forest theory is that people are retreating from the public internet. And the numbers agree. In the UK, an Ofcom report showed that the percentage of users who actively post fell from 61% to 49% year over year. In the US, a Morning Consult survey found that 28% reported posting less often than the previous year. Just 33% now post daily, and for Gen Z that number is even lower at 18%.
The Future: Pay, Invite, or Verify
It is likely that within the next few decades, AI generated content will account for 90% of all new content published online. The human web will be replaced with a generated web, and as a result we will become deeply skeptical of one another’s realness.
The migration to gated, non-indexable communities will continue while we hand over the public spaces to AI agents capable of navigating the noise and interacting with each other without our presence.
But leaving the public space means losing one’s voice and initiative. And it means losing access to our ever-evolving collection of knowledge and ideas. This is a big loss, and attempts will be made to protect our from voices dilution and distrust.
One way is to make scalable automation uneconomical by requiring users to pay to participate in an online platform. A one-time fee of a few dozen dollars can raise the barrier to entry without introducing a recurring burden. Of course, that means changing the current norm, where we prefer to pay with our attention and personal data. It looks impossible now, but as our relationship with the internet matures, we might find it’s in our best interest.
Another way is to implement a web of trust system, where people can vouch for each other. Such systems are prevalent today in torrenting communities. To get in, you need to be invited by a trusted member of the platform, and after you’re in, you can invite others. But your invites are noted down, and if someone you invited turns out to be a bot and gets banned, you get banned as well. You basically stake your account for other people’s legitimacy.
In the meantime, governments are salivating at the idea of making users verify themselves with a passport or biometric data. Yet a more elegant approach exists, called zero-knowledge proof, which lets you prove your humanity without giving away any part of your identity. These techniques are in development and, remarkably, are recommended by the EU. EU Regulation 2024/1183 states:
Member States should integrate different privacy-preserving technologies, such as zero knowledge proof, into the European Digital Identity Wallet. Those cryptographic methods should allow a relying party to validate whether a given statement based on the person’s identification data is true, without revealing any data on which that statement is based.
And finally, as the forest grows darker, noisier, and less human, we may simply spend less time online and more time with the people and communities around us. That doesn’t sound so bad either.