r/DeadInternetTheory • u/ProductTop9807 • Feb 28 '26
The AI feedback loop is officially closed, and I am tired of watching the internet rot. I am building a filter to fix this.
Hey everyone. I need to talk about the reality of what we are actually looking at right now.
It officially happened. Sometime between 2025 and 2026, the volume of AI generated content pushed out in a single year completely surpassed all the human content created in the entire history of the web (maybe cap, honestly I might have just been consumed by fake info myself, but you get the point).
To be clear, I do not hate AI. I did not see anything wrong with it in the beginning and I still do not. The technology itself is fine. I cannot judge it. The real rot comes from human laziness. It takes at least a little bit of intelligence to use AI properly. But people are too lazy to actually fact check what the machine spits out. They just take unverified slop and dump it directly onto trusted networks.
It is exactly like teaching one school teacher the wrong facts. All of their students learn the wrong thing, and then they grow up to teach the next generation the exact same lies. It is a butterfly effect of pure misinformation. And honestly, everyone is just completely sick of looking at it.
And that is how we end up in this massive closed feedback loop.
AI generates this meaningless slop because of lazy prompting. It gets published on sites where the only verification is "source: just trust me bro". Then the big tech scrapers come in and use those exact same sites to train their next-gen models. The AI is literally training on the output of other AI.
I am 16 so I might not know every single technical detail, but I remember seeing videos and university lectures a while ago explaining how LLMs are now learning from smaller AIs and getting rewarded for it. At first glance, it sounds like a smart tech breakthrough. But if you actually think about it, it is literally just cheating. When developers run out of real human answers, they just cheat the system. And that is exactly why the internet, social media, and programming platforms are flooded with garbage.
You go to some random obscure website that nobody even visits, and there is a massive wall of text. There is no way a human wrote or checked all that in such a short time. But the guy running the site just trusts the AI and leaves it there. It looks super detailed like a Wikipedia page, but the second you start actually reading it, anyone with a brain realizes it is total slop.
It is a closed circle of garbage, and with every single iteration, this slop multiplies in a geometric progression.
If you look at the long term, the shit we are wrapping ourselves in is not just going to ruin the web. It is going to affect us directly. Our lives basically are the internet now. If the foundational layer rots, we rot with it.
And I want to make it clear one more time. AI itself is a super technology. It is an amazing tool. The whole problem is just lazy people using it completely wrong and ruining it for the rest of us.
I am tired of watching it happen. In the near future, I really want to build a filter system to at least remove this slop from human eyes before finding human information becomes mathematically impossible. I know this sounds like a massive pipe dream that no one will ever actually finish, or just empty words blowing in the wind. But I would be genuinely glad to find like minded people who want to figure this out with me. If you want to help build this or have any ideas on the architecture, my DMs are open.
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Mar 01 '26
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u/PrudentLetterhead354 Mar 01 '26
positive companies and actors need to push themselves to the AI space to control the evolution
OP, youre young, im sure you will find a way to change the world as long as you keep the attitude. the wave of change is now
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Feb 28 '26
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
The irony of calling a post about fighting AI slop 'slop' just proves my point about how much we have lost trust in human writing.
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u/Icelock Feb 28 '26
More slop.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
I am not going to take the bait. If you have an actual argument, let's hear it, but I am not wasting time on cheap ragebait.
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u/Mousedancing Mar 01 '26
As an enthusiastic explorer of the wonders of the early internet, I join in your frustration of what it has become with commercialism and the AI takeover.
I'm not a coder, more on the UI design side, but to me it seems like there would have to be something of an alternate internet. Unsure how exactly what would be done technically, but similar to dark web, that uses an alternate URL system and browsers - a "Human" internet could potentially be easier to make than trying to parse and filter out all the AI already there.
Two key things it would need would be a way to keep AI from training on it and a way to filter/reject AI-generated content. Unfortunately, I don't think today's "AI-checkers" are very accurate, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done given the right variables to look for.
There are pros and cons of course, but just throwing the idea out there. :)
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u/Key-Secretary-9442 Mar 02 '26
I just wanted to let you know, the fact you’re sixteen gives me hope for the future.
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u/thevnom Mar 01 '26
You say this is "the internet dying" but im afraid its worse.
People are auto generating books on the latest trends, putting them up on Amazon Books that handles the printing for all individually sold copies and the "author" takes a cut. Its garbage that barely works, but i'm trying to convey the feeling that *all* information sources are about to get poisoned. We also children's books with AI generated pictures and stories. Video slop has started being generated on all breaking news. Ai generated bill clinton and trump in bed, ai generated maduro arrest. etc. Github repos are getting flooded with ai generated PRs and have now closed open contributions because they spend too much time closing them.
We are seeing the collapse of information, and i cant see trusted sources like Wikipedia survive all this.
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u/Bozgroup Mar 01 '26
Wikipedia is just leftest slop anyway, so good riddence !
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u/urStupidAndIHateYou Apr 22 '26
How did you pass the written LEO test
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u/Bozgroup Apr 26 '26
Same way your mommy did! She should have swallowed in your case!
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u/urStupidAndIHateYou Apr 29 '26
Just to be clear, you're suggesting you sucked my Dad's dick, but unlike you, when my Mom did it, she did not swallow but rather spit my Dad's cum into her own pussy, resulting in my birth.
You spent 3 days crafting that.
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u/StickStill9790 Feb 28 '26
Good post, but:
AI just revealed the huge array of flaws in the system. Ironically, flooding the net will finish destroying what small amounts of trust remained and send us back to an era requiring verifiable proof and human contact. We will still use it, but more like we use Tv to entertain.
There will be a few sites that are trustworthy, and satellite information, multiphase monitoring from drones, and realtime video of human behavior will establish the baseline of what is actually true. We’re going to go from language models trained on human observation, to database models based on actual monitoring on macro to microscopic pattern recognition.
Maybe fifteen years or less, but that’s the next step.
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u/Chescoreich Feb 28 '26
Yeah. In 2010s the main internet feature that impressed people was it's power of gathering information. It was Very common and cool to get answers in blogs and YouTube tutorials. AI content and quickly made videos Just destroyed this internet feature.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
Exactly. The 2010s internet felt like a huge library of human experience. When you watched a tutorial or read a blog you knew there was a real person on the other side who actually did the work.
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u/Chescoreich Feb 28 '26
Sometimes I go to old meme blogs and videogame ones to see old style tutorials and jokes. The chats and Q&A sounded more human really. Not Just that, but It was less aggressive. Now internet is full of trolls and hate
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u/StickStill9790 Mar 01 '26
Yeah, I want a medium between the sedated Quora and the volatile Reddit.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
That is a fascinating perspective. I actually fear the internet is already becoming just a place for entertainment rather than information. We are losing that baseline of truth you mentioned.
But I think we can still fight for some spaces. At least in social media, adding heuristic filters is not as impossible as it seems. If you have a motivated team and a clear goal, you can start filtering out the most obvious synthetic patterns right now. We do not have to wait for some distant future for databases to save us. We need a way to protect the human dialogue today before it is completely drowned out. Do you think a community-driven filter could actually work as a temporary bridge?
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u/StickStill9790 Mar 01 '26
I’d wish, but it’s too late. A decade of training the children that hate is the best motivator has ruined the soup. We need a full generation or two before we can get back to reasonable discourse online. AI has simply taken away the motivator for most.
Why poke someone who can’t be offended? Why compare yourself to someone who doesn’t exist? Why feel attracted to someone who will turn out in reality to be completely average, or quite literally binary?
The net will return, but after the AI gen (Alpha) and then Robot gen (Beta) have matured.
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u/Bozgroup Mar 01 '26
The internet was never meant to be for public use, but was designed as a nuclear event proof command and control network for the government.
Add humans (public) and ignorance, misinformation, and chaos ensues!
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u/Bozgroup Apr 26 '26
Like Bulletin Boards with moderators back in the day! People were called out to account for BS!
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u/JeffTheMasterr Mar 01 '26
AI sucks at its core because of the fact that to train it, trainers need to take a huge amount of works (art, code, text, etc.) without attribution and in violation of licenses and common morals and whatnot. It's a plagarist at its fundament lol. It then goes on to replace the people that made those things that it 'learned' off of, which sucks. I don't see how you can still like AI even when perceiving it as destroying the web.
It proves useful for automating stuff that humans usually do, but it's doubtful that said automation is good or ethical, considering cases like AI autodenying insurance claims and whatnot.
I can help you program an AI filter but keep in mind that AI detectors are a really bad technology nowadays that incorrectly flag human written stuff as AI. Using the eyes and noticing patterns are our best bet.
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u/PureSignalLove Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
You're seeing something real, but it's not laziness. It's something more fundamental.
The feedback loop you described is accurate. AI generates slop, it gets published unverified, scrapers ingest it, next-gen models train on it. You've got the mechanics right. Where it breaks down is the assumption humans were doing better before AI showed up.
They weren't. Lotka (1926) found 60% of scientists publish exactly one paper, ever. Productivity follows an inverse square distribution. Real content creation has always been concentrated in a tiny minority. Park et al. (2023) analyzed 45 million papers and found disruptive innovation declined 91-100% across every field between 1945 and 2010, decades before GPT existed. Bloom et al. (2020) found we need 41x more researchers today just to match 1930s output growth. The system was drowning in noise before AI touched it. AI just turned the tap to full.
Here's the part nobody says: most people can't fact-check AI output because they were never fact-checking anything. Their relationship with information has always been social, not analytical. "Is this true?" was never the question. "Does everyone else believe this?" was. Berns et al. (2005) put people in an fMRI and found that social pressure didn't just change what most people said. It changed what the visual cortex reported. Conformity rewrites perception at the neural level.
That's why "teach people to fact-check" doesn't work. You can't independently verify information when your processing system is built to accept social consensus as ground truth. Think about how most people use AI: "Write me a LinkedIn post." "Summarize this email." That's not laziness. That IS their entire conception of the tool. They can't conceive of it as a reasoning engine because reasoning outside social context is not something they do.
AI amplifies whatever cognitive capacity you bring to it. Same tool, completely different outputs depending on who's holding it.
Your filter idea is real, but I'd reframe the problem. "Is this AI generated" is the wrong question. The right question is "does this text contain actual logical structure, precise claims, and internally consistent reasoning?" You can quantify that. Logical density, reference precision, hedging frequency, whether claims are supported or just asserted. I'm building exactly this right now. Scoring text with a 13-feature rubric, calibrated against classical texts (Aristotle, Russell, Darwin) as ground-truth for what structured thought actually looks like versus what just performs it. If the next gen of models is going to train on internet text, someone needs to give them a quality signal. Right now scrapers treat a philosophy proof and a LinkedIn carousel as equivalent data. That's the rot vector, and it's fixable.
The fact that you see the structural problem, not just "AI bad" but the information-theoretic loop underneath it, is rare. DM me if you're serious about building in this space., not just "AI bad" but the information-theoretic loop underneath it, is rare. DM me if you're serious about building in this space.
**Sources:**
Berns, G. S., et al. (2005). Neurobiological correlates of social conformity and independence during mental rotation. *Biological Psychiatry*, 58(3), 245-253.
Bloom, N., Jones, C. I., Van Reenen, J., & Webb, M. (2020). Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? *American Economic Review*, 110(4), 1104-1144.
Lotka, A. J. (1926). The frequency distribution of scientific productivity. *Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences*, 16(12), 317-323.
Park, M., Leahey, E., & Funk, R. J. (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. *Nature*, 613, 138-144.
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u/Jean_velvet Feb 28 '26
Everything from public forums to GitHub is flooded with fake code and published hallucinations. It's quite literally poisoning the well.
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u/norbertmars Mar 01 '26
If you ask me, the problem with A. I. and the Internet in general is the number of bad actors out there intent on corrupting the model. Either out of bloody-mindedness, or malicious intent, there is so much garbage and misinformation in training models that anything that comes out of A. I. systems is practically worthless. The best option is to scrap it and start again, only with trusted and verifiable information.
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u/mrben1324 Mar 03 '26
I can’t code or help in any way but I am inspired by your motivation to help this, I hope you keep the fire and your numbers grow, I will keep toiling on the enshitified internet digging through slop until you finish the AI Failter is complete, Godspeed.
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u/milkfloureggs Feb 28 '26
Brand affiliate tag on the user
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Feb 28 '26
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u/milkfloureggs Feb 28 '26
No, it says “brand affiliate” next to your name on this post and next to all the posts on your profile, which is an hour old and all the posts are the same post.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
I am new to Reddit and just created this account so I probably hit the wrong button when posting. I have no idea why it says brand affiliate because I am not promoting anything. I just posted in a few places to get more opinions out of curiosity. Thanks for pointing it out I will try to find how to turn that off.
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u/FinalNandBit Feb 28 '26
Ironically the only way to combat it is to build your filter with ai.
Way too much big of a project to build a filter which a human tweaks manually.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
I agree we need AI to fight AI, but there is a huge difference between a generative model and a controlled script with strict limits that just detects patterns.
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u/FYIgfhjhgfggh Feb 28 '26
"real" special interest websites will slowly return.
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u/djonma Mar 01 '26
Special interest websites got utterly destroyed by the more recent, big, Google search algorithm. It's all utter crap in search results now. That or reddit.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
I agree. Those human spaces never really disappeared, but our generation has let the line between real and fake information get completely blurred.
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u/FYIgfhjhgfggh Mar 03 '26
People love delusion, and there are a large proportion of the population that are so disconnected from society that they do not see any link between themselves, their actions and it's affect on those around them and within what remains of real communities.
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u/GlitteringLion3800 Feb 28 '26
It would be great if someone came up with a text based equivalent of https://c2pa.org/
This is a new standard where cameras add an un-forgeable signature to the pictures they take, so that it can be put beyond doubt that the image you're looking at was at least taken by a camera (though of course you could take a photo of an AI generated image, but at least fraudsters would now encounter a lot of friction).
I don't know how such a standard would be possible for text, but in any case I think it will be impossible to detect AI written text and images soon. So we need to agree to a common standard which confirms the inverse.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
That is a great point about C2PA but we have to think deeper. It is like Chinese counterfeits: at first they look terrible but eventually they catch up to the original. If a phone can add a signature AI will eventually find a way to forge that signature too.
It is a constant race. AI will reach our current security level sooner or later but we have to use that time to get even further ahead. We can not just rely on one digital seal and stop there because the goal is to always stay one step ahead of the machine. If we don't keep moving then even the best standards will just become another tool for AI to hide behind.
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u/GlitteringLion3800 Mar 01 '26
AI will reach our current security level sooner or later but we have to use that time to get even further ahead.
Will they though? LLMs are good hackers but only because they're trained on the text of real hackers. They don't deal in novelty very well, whereas cryptography and hacking are skills that uniquely deal in novelty.
And encryption is encryption no matter how clever the thing trying to crack it is. To break a sufficiently strong encryption would take millions of years of compute, assuming there isn't some other weakness in the encryption algorithm (which again, in order to exploit that, an AI would require the ability to deal with novelty in a way that escapes LLMs in principle)
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Feb 28 '26
For 16 you’re a great writer. Take the SAT so u can get a merit based scholarship for college
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
Thank you. I actually already took the SAT and submitted my applications. I am waiting for the results now. While I was applying, I wrote my supplemental essays about this exact topic.
One of the main metaphors I used in my essays was comparing the current internet to an echo in an empty room. We are reaching a point where AI models are just quoting other AI models, and the original human voice is getting lost in the noise.
Researching for those essays is what made me so interested in this. It started as a college requirement, but now I really want to focus on building a filter for real. Do you think admissions officers will actually value a topic like this? I wrote about the dangers of the AI feedback loop and how I want to influence the future of the web. I am curious if that stands out or just sounds like another student project.
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u/TrophyWife63 Feb 28 '26
I have basically zero tech knowledge and can’t be of any real help here but I wholeheartedly support your mission.
I long for the old days when you could search for “how to preserve chillies” and actually get a blog post or article from a human being’s cooking website. Instead everything returned is some bullshit wall of text with each paragraph contradicting the last, supposedly written by “Frank James” three days ago, when he also wrote articles on how to choose the best dog for your family and which supplements you need in perimenopause.
If you know a little bit about what you’re researching you can spot the obvious errors, like telling you to “prune just above a node” on a plant that doesn’t have nodes. If you’re searching on something unfamiliar you’re likely to be substantially dumber by the end of the exercise. You can see where the AI has regurgitated four paragraphs from four different (likely also AI) websites that aren’t quite in the right context. And round and round we go.
I’d give anything for a filter that only allows “written by an actual human” results. I don’t even care if AI wrote it as long as a human checked and edited the content.
And don’t get me started on fucking YouTube. That AI voice makes me want to chew off my own ears.
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u/ProductTop9807 Feb 28 '26
I totally feel you. Honestly I am fed up too. You open TikTok YouTube or Instagram and see this stuff and it makes you want to throw up. Sometimes you actually catch yourself listening and it even feels interesting for a second but then you realize it is either fake or just pure nonsense.
That is exactly why I am looking for like minded people to build this. Creating a filter for AI generated videos is a technical challenge we can actually solve but how to fight the misinformation itself is something only God knows. We have to start somewhere and a human centric filter is the first step to taking our ears and eyes back from these algorithms.
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u/TrophyWife63 Mar 01 '26
Agreed. So many people around me loathe this AI content. Maybe all their views are bots as well. The whole thing’s a farce.
Meanwhile, I’ve been downvoted…probably Frank…
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u/Better-Material5382 Feb 28 '26
I actually just created an account because I saw this post and felt it so much. I tried searching for a simple coding fix on a forum yesterday and had to scroll through 5 pages of AI-generated 'summaries' that were completely wrong. The web is becoming a ghost town of bots talking to bots. Glad someone is actually trying to build a filter instead of just complaining. How far along are you with the architecture?