ENTERPRISE AI ANALYSIS

Baudrillard and the Dead Internet Theory. Revisiting Baudrillard's (dis)trust in Artificial Intelligence

The goal of this paper is therefore to revisit Baudrillard's take on artificial intelligence, which he expressed in his essay Xerox and Infinity from 1993, and to present the theoretical implications of value theory and symbolic exchange that underlie in his arguments. This discussion will show how Baudrillard's notion of simulation and the proliferation of the sign foresaw the consequences of AI-generated media and content, which subsequently led to what is now subsumed to as the “dead internet theory” (Walter, 2024; Mariani, 2023; DiResta & Goldstein, 2024). From this perspective, the internet is no longer a digital representation of a once analog human culture. It has rather become a self-recreating force that has modulated and strayed away from its human origin through AI-generated content that has automated and now spreads across social media platforms, pushing human-generated content out of the virtual sphere. This phenomenon aligns with Baudrillard's understanding of detached and simulated signs within a cultural space. For Baudrillard, simulated signs no longer recruit their meaning through their duty of representation, but through their positioning within a network of other signs, as I will show later in the discussion of the industrial and code-gov-erned era of sign production. I will argue that exactly this detachment of signs ultimately leads to a death of meaning, as we can observe now with the dead internet phenomenon. Bots, AI texts, and images are spreading uncontrollably across various digital platforms and environments, creating a sphere that becomes increasingly detached from an element of human connection and representation, therefore, a “dead internet”. From a Baudrillardian perspective, the dead internet is not an accident but an inevitable event.