The Web of the Living Dead: The New AI Society - Mindplex
AI bots flood our feeds, blurring truth and fiction. Is this the 'immersive digital future' we were promised—or something far darker? Meta VP Connor Hayes said he expected a future where AI bots will be as relevant to social platforms as human users. I don’t know what he was expecting, but what he got was a backlash that forced the company to take down AI-driven profiles. The Agentic Web has been surging forward recently, and forward-thrust always brings reaction. We have seen AI agents given crypto wallets to trade with and Twitter accounts to pump their portfolios to audiences who are more willing to embrace the chaos.
AI Integration in Social Platforms
The promulgation of AI social media profiles on mainstream platforms was always going to happen. Turing tests are becoming ever more severe – for humans. What’s the purpose of this? To create a ‘more immersive digital future’? To populate dead metaverses? Really the business goal is to use focused AI models to unlock new forms of user engagement with dedicated training and to capture human data more precisely and vividly than ever before. Creating interactive brand experiences (ugh!) and, in gaming terms, ensuring the lobby is always full for whatever interests their infinitely diverse user base desires. That, then, increases revenue per hour of engagement and attention; it feeds the bottom line.
The Cost of AI Integration
If that’s the plan, it sure is expensive. It costs $1000 for Open AI’s o3 model to respond to a single query. That’s just about enough money to keep one human sheltered, fed, and entertained for a month – even in developed countries. Is one AI query worth more than a month of human cognitive output? No, of course it’s not. Not yet anyway. But with economies of scale the math changes. Efficiency will grow and grow over time. At what point do bots become worthwhile ways of engaging users? At what point is it cheaper to keep this AI cognitive output alive than to keep a human alive?
The Rise of AI Agents
'Dead internet theory' has been a meme conspiracy for nearly a half a decade. The theory states that most internet activity we see today is merely the product of artificial intelligence bots put in place to distribute social propaganda and swerve our thinking towards the end of its creators. Like all good conspiracy theories, it was nonsense with a shred of truth. In the years since the theory emerged, the internet has become steadily more suffused with agents and bots of every shade and stripe. With LLMs becoming so advanced as to be (nearly) indistinguishable from human activity, it was only a matter of time before companies began using these agents both overtly and covertly to boost their end goals.
The Future of AI Society
It’s all fun and games until we lose control of the narrative, until the bots begin lying and going off script, until it’s their voices that are heard, not yours. Surely you, tech-literate consumer of frontier tech literature with an active stake in the abundant future, wouldn’t be fooled by such memetic babbling. Until the day you are, and you find yourself nodding along to the advice of an LLM influencer, or falling in love with a girl who never existed.
