The Dead Internet Theory was an obsession of mine even before it had an official name. In 2017 I became obsessed with the idea of shills and astroturfing. I thought I was crazy to think these bad actors would influence anything other than politics, but time has proven me otherwise. I was indeed correct.
Animal videos on youtube always have comments about animals being better than people or some variation of it. Why can't people just comment something normal? Why do these comments subtly manipulate us into hating ourselves? Not only that, but go on any country subreddit and it's full of people making xenophobic comments about people in said country. This is especially true for subs that are populated by "expats". But the bots do the same thing in other languages as well. I've noticed this on my country's sub. Advice that doesn't make sense in the country's context, that seems to be copied from American subs. The syntax is also like this. It's as if they were using a translator.
I wonder if this is also happening on NeoCities? Like a type of AI that is able to create a whole website from scratch. It is possible and a lot of these AI sites appear on google's first page. Those are bland and basic, but I do wonder, what if there's AI strong enough to make aesthetic looking ones?