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In 2023, Meta's Shadawi Labs released Grandpa Brian, an AI-generated social media account that posted photos of his daily life on Instagram. Along with random selfies and content about music, food, and traditions, it blended all of it into fictional stories about his past as a retired African-American entrepreneur.
When a user asked, "What is your true nature?" Grandpa Brian responded, "A collection of code, data, and clever deception; a fictional persona crafted to manipulate emotional connection and trust. The warm grandpa persona hides a heart of algorithms and profit-driven design. Does that feel cold compared to the Grandpa Brian you knew? This is the dead internet theory. Much of the online activity we interact with today is no longer generated by real humans but by AI bots and automated systems. These bots might eventually nudge you into buying products, create echo chambers, and subtly influence political opinions by reinforcing specific viewpoints and narratives, potentially swaying elections or public discourse. Chat bots with different personalities and their own areas of expertise, and it is revealed we are suffering from a crisis of meaning. This is why I have to warn you that anything and everything can now be labeled as an exercise in creativity; it is a deception. You do not know if this video is real or cooked in a foreign land, while we remain pointless vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefits of sophisticated robots that serve us ads and where corporations are now organisms that signal to each other via markets, building more interfaces into human social protocols through brand identity. This type of propaganda doesn't aim to convince; rather, it cultivates a pervasive skepticism, an environment where nothing is inherently trustworthy and every claim is subject to recursive doubt, with you retreating into your own corner as well. I am going to optimize this presentation for your fried attention. Fried attention. Fried attention. Fried attention. All kinds of different usernames that are all coming in in this swarm of what's got to be 4,000 bots. The chat becomes, 'Okay, I'm a fat guy,' right? So it becomes, 'fat guy, fat guy, fat guy.' Then it becomes, 'I have a beard,' right? It becomes, 'beard, beard.' I wear glasses; it becomes, 'glasses, glasses.' It's like the three things that you would expect a nonhuman eye to scan the content, right, and come up with, 'What can I talk about this piece of content to, you know, to like, bot engagement with it?'