This wild theory about the Internet is circulating again, and it all has to do with Shrimp Jesus. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the infamous AI-generated Facebook image of Shrimp Jesus and other variations floating around the internet. That image first surfaced in March 2024 and appeared to be a meme at first glance. However, Shrimp Jesus was the jumping-off point for Facebook AI art slop. These consist of newly AI-generated memes sweeping the internet, such as the Challah Horse, the 386-year-old granny baking her own birthday cake and the random wooden cars, just to name a few. You might think these are just memes, but these images reignite discussions surrounding an old online conspiracy called the Dead Internet Theory, which began in 2021.
As someone who writes about the internet for a living, this was the first time I’d heard of this idea, and researching it led me down a bottomless rabbit hole from which I struggled to emerge. But if you frequently use TikTok, Instagram or Facebook, you might have unwittingly already seen examples online that echo this premise. So, what is the Dead Internet Theory, and how does it parallel the rise of artificial intelligence?
What is the Dead Internet Theory?
The Dead Internet Theory first emerged in 2021 on the online forums, 4chan and Wizardchan. People took to these forums claiming that the internet died in 2016 and that AI bots mostly run the content we now see online. This theory also supports the possibility that AI is being used to manipulate the public due to a much larger and sinister agenda. These posts were pieced together in a lengthy thread and published on another online forum called Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe. Be aware, the thread can be easily accessed online, but I did not link to it due to the obscene language in the post.
User IlluminatiPirate wrote, “The internet feels empty and devoid of people. It is also devoid of content.”
Now, years later, this conspiracy is seeing the light of day again with a rise of TikTok creators dissecting the theory and finding examples to support it. One creator, with a username of SideMoneyTom, posted a video in March 2024, showing examples of different Facebook accounts posting variations of AI-generated images of Jesus. These images provide little traffic online, yet they can still easily proliferate your feed. Like many other online creators, SideMoneyTom echoed the same sentiment: These Facebook accounts are run by AI bots and create all content. To better understand this theory, it helps to know how generative AI works.
Generative AI uses artificial intelligence systems that produce new content in the form of stories, images, videos, music and even software code. According to Monetate, “Generative AI uses machine-learning algorithms and training data to generate new, plausibly human-passing content.” With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, chatbots have become all the rage these days, with tech giants like Google, Apple and MetaAI creating a slew of AI tools for their products. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Now, back to Shrimp Jesus. If you feed specific data and prompts to a chatbot, you’ll find that these images are “human-passing.” Emphasis on “passing.” Content created by chatbots is certainly known to have its faults.
“While large pre-trained systems such as LLMs [large language models] have made impressive advancements in their reasoning capabilities, more research is needed to guarantee correctness and depth of the reasoning performed by them,” AI experts wrote in a report by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
However, Shrimp Jesus and other AI-generated images aren’t the only things online believers use to substantiate this theory.
Are these bots or real people?
If you spend enough time on social media, you’ll see odd things in the comments section of certain posts, like repetitive comments from accounts that are irrelevant to the post. These comments are often strange and don’t make sense. Last winter, Bluesky subscribers took to Reddit to complain about being plagued by reply bots that were politely and annoyingly argumentative.
One user flagged the common signs to spot these reply bots and what to do when encountering them. Some indications you’re experiencing a bot are when the account is new and has many replies to different posts, as seen from this Bluesky reply bot account.
How to spot an AI bot:
- An account with a short bio, a bio that is too specific, or is missing one.
- An account with no photos or only AI-generated photos.
- The account is relatively new.
- An account with few or no followers.
- An account with an odd followers-to-likes ratio. (If they have 10K followers but their posts receive 50 to 100 likes.)
- An account that posts scammy comments.
