Inteligencia Artificial (IA)
More Bots than People on the Internet: The New Era of the Dead Internet and Its Unstoppable Growth
Paloma Firgaira
2025-09-28
5 min read
Generation Z is revolutionizing the way information is sought: more and more young people prefer TikTok, ChatGPT, and other social media over Google. "I search on TikTok first because I see experiences from people my age that seem more genuine," explains a user. This shift reflects a profound transformation in how we interact with the Internet and the trust we place in content.
The concept of a "dead Internet" has ceased to be a conspiracy theory and has become a realistic description of the current state of the web. According to this idea, since 2016, human-generated content has been displaced by posts created by machines and algorithms. The emergence of AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Apple Intelligence has accelerated this process. The Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies estimates that by 2030, 99% of online content will be generated by AI.
The numbers support this trend. NewsGuard, a digital security company, has identified over 1,271 news sites managed exclusively by AI, many of which simulate being local or specialized media. These portals often spread false information about public figures, fabricated events, or old news presented as current.
Misinformation is just one of the consequences of this rise of AI. Perceptions of tastes, opinions, and even political trends are also distorted. The Bad Bot 2025 report, produced by Imperva, reveals that bots now account for 51% of Internet traffic, surpassing human users for the first time. This means that most comments, reviews, and posts we see may not be authentic.
This reality forces us to question the veracity of the opinions and recommendations we consume daily: Are product reviews real? Can we trust social media comments? What value do likes or views have if much of it comes from automated accounts?
The proliferation of bots and AI-generated content has led to absurd situations, as described by communicator Ophelia Pastrana: a teacher asks ChatGPT for task ideas, students complete the task with ChatGPT, and the teacher grades with AI. Machines interacting with each other, with humans increasingly sidelined.
On social media platforms like Facebook, the phenomenon of "AI slop"—low-quality content created by AI—has become common. Posts with thousands of interactions and comments generated by bots seek to simulate conversation and community but only pursue clicks and monetization. There are even creators managing hundreds of pages who ask ChatGPT for viral images to maximize reach, without any human filtering.
The platforms themselves have acknowledged the problem. Google has admitted to the increase of unreliable AI-generated content in its search results and has promised to combat it. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has also expressed concern about the deterioration of the web and the proliferation of accounts managed by LLMs.
The impact goes beyond misinformation: authentic and valuable content is buried under tons of automatically generated posts. A recent study shows that the average lifespan of a link on the Internet is just two years; 64.7% of pages archived between 1996 and 2021 have disappeared. The Pew Research Center confirms that by 2014, 38% of websites created just a year earlier had already vanished.
If the trend continues, human and authentic Internet could become a rarity, displaced by a network dominated by algorithms and machines. Generation Z, in seeking more genuine experiences on new platforms, is both a symptom and a response to this paradigm shift.