The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

And its creatures: Humans, Trolls, Bots, Ailiens, Clones, and Metarats

Mar 17, 2024

As of late, I’m seeing and hearing the phrase, “The Dark Forest of the Internet” and “The Dark Forest Theory” and “The Dark Forest Internet” bantered about on YouTube, Substack, TikTok, and X.

The Dark Forest of the Internet Theory essentially proclaims that soon (and already) humans on the internet will relocate to private, hidden spaces, that are invite only and tightly controlled by real humans to ensure that only real humans enter because otherwise spam bots, AI, fake humans, fake avatars, chatbots, and sexbots will overrun us like ads for Viagara.

Science YouTuber, Kyle Hill, made a viral video about this theory recently which now has 1.2 million views. One of my favorite Substack writers,

Daniel Pinchbeck

also wrote about it last week, and German pop theoretical physicist and philosopher Sabine Hossenfelder likewise tackled the topic, though she speculated that it will be AI who dies, not the internet because AI will absorb and regurgitate its generations in endless cycles that will eventually render it a useless tool. (Not sure how this would make it die, but okay...)

The Dark Forest Internet viral video:

People are suddenly resonating with this theory of The Dark Forest Internet, because now the masses can access AI, versus just corporations and State actors, but it’s not anything new. It’s an amalgamation of pre-existing ideas about aliens and bots. It’s The Dead Internet Theory + The Dark Forest Universe Theory, which is a response to The Fermi Paradox.

I also wrote about this phenomenon almost two years ago, but I called it The Botapocalypse:

The Botapocalypse

Charlotte Dune

April 27, 2022

Sometimes we think we’ve seen it all, done it all, but technology is constantly evolving; there are always new things to do and understand. For example, we may be living through The Botapocalypse. What do I mean by this? The Botapocalypse is the end of the living internet, the transition into an era where fake users and chatbots outnumber living humans o…

Read full story

And before my Botapocalypse idea,

Read Max

, another Substack writer had questioned “How much of the Internet is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.”

He called this transition from a living internet to a lifeless one filled with bots the “Internet Inversion” and before him, sometime between 2016 and 2018, folks in places like 4Chan started using the term The Dead Internet Theory to describe a web inhabited and created mostly by non-humans, as companies like Forbes were already using earlier AI tech to auto-generate websites and news. Troll farms were already mass-spawning web activity and text. Though as late as August 2021, mainstream outlets like The Atlantic scoffed at The Dead Internet idea and said it was “patently ridiculous.”1

Now, no one is scoffing.

Why? Because now we can all use AI at scale.

Bots vs Humans? Or Humans vs Ailiens?

With the mass adoption of ChatGPT, MidJourney, and soon Soma, OpenAI’s video-generating application, and the flood of AI images, video, and content, including 11% of the 2024 Pulitzer prize finalists admitting to using AI in their work, the Dead Internet is finally upon us, but we’ve again renamed it, with a new and chilling phrase taken directly from one of my all-time favorite sci-fi novels, The Dark Forest, by Chinese author Liu Cixin, soon to be part of a Netflix series, and the second book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past Series, more popularly known as The Three-Body Problem Series.

Remembrance of Earth's Past - Wikipedia — The three books in the Three-Body Problem Series, also known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past Series, by Liu Cixin

In this novel, “The Dark Forest” refers to our universe—a dark forest in which sentient species stay hidden because they fear attacks from other creatures lurking in the “dark forest” of outer space.

This idea is a response to The Fermi Paradox, which refers to our situation of having no evidence of other sentient life in the universe, yet the feeling that other life MUST exist in the universe because the universe is SO big.

The Dark Forest Theory’s answer: other life exists, but it’s hiding in fear of us or others. Or it’s hunting us and hasn’t found us yet.

In this theory, civilizations are like deer, staying quiet, and hiding from an unknown hunter. The hunter could be us, or we could be the deer, but regardless, the universe is a dark, hostile place, and maybe we shouldn’t look for aliens because they might destroy us the moment they realize where we are located.

But why only worry about bots, spam, and AI crud? Shouldn’t we also worry about super-sentient-machine-intelligences? I’ll call these Ailiens for fun.

We can also think of the Internet as a universe and wonder if sentient life besides us already exists in our Internet… and if it does, will we befriend it? Or destroy it? (Hi, Claude.)

A fan-fic book, *The Redemption of Time*, set in the Three-Body Problem universe and widely considered the fourth book in the series, despite not being written by the original author.

We can also think of the Internet as a universe and wonder if sentient life besides us already exists in it… and if it does, will we befriend it? Or destroy it?

The Forest for the Trees

In 2019, a writer named Yancey Strickler linked Liu Cixin’s idea of the dark forest universe to the Internet in a medium article called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.”

He wrote,

In his sci-fi trilogy The Three-Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe… This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

His metaphor is a bit off though, because The Dark Forest is the ENTIRE Internet. Moving into shelters of “privacy” like Discord or private Facebook Groups (wishful thinking because nothing online is really “private”) is more like the deer hiding behind a tree or in a cave within The Dark Forest.

And now, not only are we trying to escape the general public, trolls, and advertisers, but we’re also trying to escape the Inhumans, the AI-generated entities, which I’ve also called MetaRats, and maybe soon the Ailiens and the clones.

Because while most of us LIKE engaging with the AI when we know we’re engaging with the AI, we DO NOT LIKE it when we are engaging with an AI pretending to be a human.

I sort of wonder if we will stop caring about this, but we haven’t yet.

Continuing with this thinking, British writer Maggie Appleton penned an essay in 2023 called “The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative Ai,” in which she cites Yancy Strickler’s Dark Forest Internet essay, but calls the trees we hide behind, “The Cozy Web.” She presents an illustration to show what she means:

Image from https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web

She writes,

“Our new challenge as little snowflake humans will be to prove we aren't language models. It's the reverse Turing test…. we will become deeply skeptical of one another's realness…
How would you prove you’re not a language model generating predictive text? What special human tricks can you do that a language model can’t?”

“We will become deeply skeptical of one another’s realness.” I’m already there.

Suspicious Creatures

I tend not to converse much with people on social media unless I’ve met them in real life or at least on a Zoom call. Otherwise, I fear I’m chatting with a bot. I’m also fairly certain an FBI bot was trying to befriend me at one point. And this fakery is only going to get worse.

When I see a well-known spokesperson or public figure talking about something in a short clip that isn’t directly from their account, I go right past it, because I know it could be a deep fake.

But perhaps we will continue to reject the deep fakes, but will accept the clones if we know they were created by the original human? For example, we may happily converse with Andrew Huberman’s clone if we know he owns the clone…

We will either have to stop caring if someone online is real, find some reliable test or proof of humanness, or abandon the Internet/social media, and hide behind trees in what some have called “The Great Logging Off.”

Writer Lars Doucet asks,

“What happens when most "people" you interact with in the internet are fake? I think people start logging off.”

Well, I doubt it. People love being online too much to give it up.

My prediction: we stop caring if people are real. We may even come to prefer the AI, the Ailiens.

But who knows…

If I had to rank the creatures of the Dark Forest Internet in order of concern, it might go something like this:

Humans: Us regular users of the Internet

Trolls: Humans that suck, that have a wide-scale agendas and are working in tandem on “farms.”

Bots: Mindless code engaging in repetitive tasks with an agenda for either individuals or corporations

Metarats: Corporate or individual machine creatures with more sophisticated agendas than bots, like fairly sophisticated chatbots, deepfakes, or rapidly proliferating AI-generated agents/avatars.

Clones: AI/autonomous VR versions or avatars of real humans

Ailiens: Actual emerging sentient machines and machine super-intelligence.