Just in Time Dead Internet

This note is really just joining two existing concepts together, I’ll briefly introduce both below.

Just in Time

Some time ago, there were quite a bit of “just in time” success stories. From “just in time compilation” to “just in time delivery”, the concept of “just in time” being applied to different scenarios was common.

The idea largely being that you don’t need to have everything (code/supplies/etc) ready ahead of time, you can optimize by setting up your supply-chain to deliver things “just in time” instead of managing a warehouse. Similarly, your code can be compiled “just in time” when the request comes in, instead of ahead of time.

Dead Internet

Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory that

“asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, minimising organic human activity to manipulate the population.”

Just in Time Dead Internet

With the rapid rise & progress in the AI/ML space from image/video generation to text generation, it’s not hard to imagine a “just in time dead internet” scenario.

In this scenario, the web you browse would largely be generated on the fly by machines. Everything from articles, images, videos, entire social media networks & web personas could be generated on the fly.

Implications

My optimistic take on this is that it could be a good thing. If humans can no longer be certain that they’re interacting with other humans online, it could push us back into each other’s company IRL.

We might be closer to this being a reality than most think.