Earlier this evening, I misspoke at the dinner table. I said something about the word ‘agua’ being French. My daughter quickly said, ‘No, it’s Spanish!’

And because I’m a Dad, I decided to lean into the con. I said, ‘No, it’s French. I can’t remember what it’s French for, but I know it means something in French.’ And while I was saying that, I typed into my phone, as if I was Googling what it was for.

Instead, I was typing the first message below into Gemini. It replied with its first message, written instead of spoken. Then, acting exasperated at my failed Googling, I just said “Hey Google” and spoke my second message out loud. It responded with its second message, also out loud for everyone at the dinner table to hear.

My kids acted amazed. My wife asked, “Wait, really? Is it spelled the same way?” in completely justifiable disbelief. Then I showed them the conversation.

Then, I started to tell my daughter, “See, you can’t believe everything you see on the internet!”, just like we’ve been told for the last 25 years. Except I realized that with the ubiquity of AI nowadays, it won’t always feel like these conversations are “on the internet”. In fact, with the rise of on-device micro-LLMs, they won’t always even be on the internet. So instead I tried to change at the last second to say, “You can’t always believe AI!” Except I’d already said, “See, you can’t believe everything you see on…” And so what I ended up saying was:

“You can’t believe everything you see on the ainternet!”

…pronounced ain’t-ernet. I was trying to merge “AI” and “internet”, but I ended up merging “ain’t” and “internet”.

And it instantly occurred to all of us: that term is the perfect description of the problem facing the modern internet, where AI slop is running amuck, where bots in comment threads and email scams are getting harder to distinguish, where creating something to superficially mislead and lend false credibility to a lie literally takes just a single message.

In the past, you couldn’t believe everything you see on the internet because people lie on the internet all the time. Now you can’t believe everything you see on the ainternet because much of it isn’t—or rather, ain’t—even written by a person at all. It’s generated by a bot following some prompt or instructions from a human user so far removed from the bot’s behavior that it may scarcely even be considered to be acting on the human’s behalf.

This is similar to the dead internet theory. The dead internet theory posits that for the last decade, the vast majority of content on the internet has been auto-generated by bots and algorithmically curated to “control the population and minimize organic human activity”, as the Wikipedia article succinctly puts it as I’m writing this. And what’s particularly remarkable to me is that the dead internet theory started to gain popularity in 2021—before tools like ChatGPT and Gemini made generating fake content so trivial.

But while the dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory that this shift is being deliberately perpetuated by state actors, I don’t think we necessarily need to go that far to see what’s happening. We can explain a lot of this just by simple economics. We exist in an attention economy with widespread data gathering and optimization; so long as human attention is considered so valuable, there will be efforts to optimize capturing as much of it as possible. Over the last decade that’s been increasingly savvy algorithms for content curation, but those relied on content existing in the first place to be curated. Using AI to custom generate the content that will hold as much attention as possible is just a natural consequence of that value and this new technology.

And that’s why the old adage that you can’t believe everything you’ve seen on the internet has been pushed into overdrive: because it’s not just that someone might be trying to lie to you to forward their own agenda. Now, the algorithms themselves may be telling you any lie they calculate will capture your attention because getting your attention is their agenda.

But it ain’t true. It ain’t authentic. It ain’t real.

It’s the ainternet.