How do we know that everyone on the internet isn't just a bot?
I mean, there might be a secret AI technology that is so advanced to the point that it can mimic a real human, make posts and comments that looks like its written by a human and even intentionally doing speling mistakes to simulate human errors. How do we know that such AI hasn't already infiltrated the internet and everything that you see is posted by this AI? If such AI actually exists, it's probably so advanced that it almost never fails barring rare situations where there is an unexpected errrrrrrrrrorrrrrrrrrrr.............
[Error: The program "Human_Simulation_AI" is unresponsive]
Ah, the dead internet "theory"? Ultimately, it doesn't matter.
Let's pretend that you're the last human on the internet, and everyone else (including me) is a bot. This means that at least some bots pass the Turing test with flying colours; they're undistinguishable from human beings and do the exact same sort of smart and dumb shit that humans do. Is there any real difference between "this is a human being, I'll treat them as such" vs. "this is a bot, but it behaves like a human being and I need to treat it as a human being"?
That quickly boils down to "How do we know anything?" and the answer to that is "We don't". When you think hard enough about anything you can come up with an explanation why what we think to onow and believe is wrong. To get around that irl you can employ different tactics. For example, you can check how plausible sonething is. How many assumptions do you have to make for a theory? Usually, more assumptions means less plausible. And you can ask yourself " why does it matter? What would it change for me?" and the answer is most likely it doesn't and nothing.
That's just a variant of the ages old Philosophy question "What is real?"
Last I checked the best answer there was is "I think therefore I am" (Descartes), which is quite old and doesn't even deal with the whole "what am I", much less with the existance or not of everything else.
"Is the Internet all AI but me" is actually pretty mild skepticism in this domain - I mean, how sure are your that your're not some kind of advanced AI yourself who believes itself to be "human" or even that the whole "human" concept is at all real and not just part of an advanced universe simulation with "generative simulated organic life" inv which various AIs which are unaware of their AI status, such as yourself, participate?
Or maybe you're just one of the brains of a 5-dimensional hyper intelligence and "life as a human" is but a game they play for such minor brains to keep them occupied...
That's a leap if I ever saw one. I could ask the same question and substitute AI with god or aliens and I'd be ridiculed by the tech community and with good reason.
And you don't need to take it much further to fall into the holographic universe principle or the simulation hypothesis and for those there are big discussions to be had in science communities.
To be clear, nothing stops you or me, or anyone for that matter from assuming so, but down that road the only answer I can think of is that nothing matters and might as well lay down and die.
Look into the research of Large Language Models (LLMs). Even the latest and greatest model has some issues that come up under rigorous testing. For example, GPT-4 (the one used by Bing) fails miserably if you ask: “How many words will there be in your next answer?”
You can spot an older LLM by asking about relationships that require some understanding of the real world. For example: “I found a shirt under the car, but it was wet. Which one was wet?” GPT-4 knows enough about the world that it makes more sense if the shirt was wet, but older models would have failed this question. With every new LLM, there are always some issues, so look up what they are.
Tom Scott made an interesting video about what the situation was 3 years ago. Obviously, LLMs are a fast moving target right now, so that video aged like milk.
You described the philosophical notion of "solipsism". Philosophers have been pondering the question for centuries. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has more: https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
Yes I have thought this about Twitter and Reddit and other text based social media. I’m not 100% sure that the majority of traffic and posts have been “seeded” by AI.
My conspiracy theory is that these sites have a vested interest in driving traffic and appearing to have high engagement or participation rates for ad sales.
Text is easy to generate with AI and the sites have a ton existing posts to train models on. What do they have to lose?