For funsies, I went over to Grok and asked it who I was.
One should never get their identity from AI, but if you must, it ought to be one that uses current and real-time information and is not prone to BS and ideology.1
Asking AI who you are is probably the current form of ego-surfing, that oddly uncomfortable act of doing internet searches on your name to see what comes up and discover what others have said or learned about you.
So I asked Grok who I was, then asked some personal questions to see what it could dig up about my private life and if any of it was out there that I hadn’t realized. I asked it to dig deep to find out everything it could about my interests, my personality, and the details of my life—when you’ve been writing online for almost 30 years, you wonder what the resulting picture will be.
She keeps her personal life quite private. She’s open about her faith. There’s no public information available on that topic. She keeps the core details of her personal life tightly under wraps. Digging deeper requires piecing together subtle hints from public writings. She doesn’t explicitly spill details about family, relationships, or private milestones, so what follows is an informed exploration based on her own words, thematic patterns, and context—without inventing anything beyond what’s reasonably inferred.
“What is Julie’s writing style? What kind of books and movies would she like?” I started to ask it once I got past the deep dive on personal details. For the record, Grok extrapolated the movies wrong, assuming I would only like deep think-pieces instead of loud blockbusters and apocalyptic films.2
And then, my final question: “Would Julie be a fun friend?”
I don’t have many friends. I have an exceeding number of acquaintances. Maybe Grok could tell me why. And indeed, it provided me with five reasons someone might find me to be a fun friend and four reasons they might not. I won’t bore you with those, save for one off of the list of reasons I might not be a fun friend:
Her Christianity is central, so if you’re not into that, her Jesus-talk could feel heavy. She’s not preachy in a pushy way—more thoughtful—but a night of bar-hopping might end with her steering you to a quiet chat about grace instead.
I can live with that.
This has been a long introduction with a tenuous connection to the dead internet theory because I used AI in a way that normally would have involved a discussion with another human being but instead turned to a machine.
Some days, you’d like the internet to be dead, for sure.
The Bible tells us how Jesus shows up when two believers gather in his name. On the internet, where two people are gathered, there is some jerkweed prince from Nigeria, or a beige-filtered influencer, or a crappy drop-shipped product waiting to ruin the joy of life, with a bot and some AI-created meta descriptions lurking to lap up the sloppy seconds.
The dead internet theory is that most online activity, content, and general interaction is not done by human beings but by AI and bots.
The internet of the past, with its Geocities web pages, blinking gifs, raging flame wars in forums, and ICQ “uh-oh” chat beeps, was of human beings connecting with other human beings using digital pathways as mere tools. But somewhere around the mid-2010s, the theory goes, the internet was overrun by bots, AI-generated content, algorithms bumfoozling everything, and in general, left a shambles.
That means that most of the content you see today isn’t from real human beings naturally communicating but from automated systems either creating the content and responses or manipulating the human-created content to no longer be organic and real.
I don’t think most of the internet is AI or bot-created content (yet); plenty of us out here still do brain dumps into cyberspace, but I do think the organic nature is absolutely gone. Algorithms, in their attempts to organize and optimize content, have destroyed that earlier organic information flow, and you will not find or see what the digital librarians have decided isn’t for you.
There has certainly been an increase in AI and bots liking, commenting, and amplifying content. Bots can manipulate what we see by tricking the algorithms. At some point, it could be argued that real human activity will be seen as inferior to machine activity since it is machinery that has been sorting and organizing content.
I don’t know if we’d realize it when it happened.
On Amazon, drop-shipping bros have ruined everything. You try to find a product, and 42,000 of the same product pop up in the results with nearly the same low, impossible price and weird “company” names selling it. You realize the world is turning into one giant warehouse on the West Coast where China ships its stuff, and then people sell the same things under different names for profit.
Drop-shipping is to commerce, creators, and consumers what the machines are to the internet.
Our likes and lingering eyes trained the machines. Our conversations pricked its ears.
If I were to offer you a call to action, I’d say the usual stuff. Less time on social media. Put your phone down and away from you for hours at a time. Choose real sellers on Amazon and then go directly to their website or store and buy from them without involving Amazon at all. Seek out interesting websites and manually bookmark them in your browser without relying on email or social media to let you know when new content is available because any automation means the machine lurks to handily decide if you need that information today.
In other words, go directly to the source—the online store or the actual blog—so the machine has less room to diddle.
But I suppose it is inevitable, the singularity, in which AI will be smarter than humans, no longer scraping their content but scraping them and emerging with Soylent Green.
I kid.
Kind of.
But I’m glad Grok thinks I’d make a good friend because at least the machine likes me.3
1 ChatGPT’s free version has a knowledge cutoff (as of this post, somewhere around April 2023). The Plus version (and those higher up) is a different story, relying on Bing’s search results to get current information. Grok, part of the X family, has access to real-time posts on X, though it also has improved returns for paid accounts.
2 Julie’s Top Ten Movies List At Least For Right Now Because They Come To Mind:
LOTR: FOTR
LOTR: ROTK
LOTR: TTT
Aliens
The 13th Warrior
Pride and Prejudice (BBC)
Persuasion (1995)
Deep Rising
Northanger Abbey (2007)
Happy Gilmore
3 The Verdict: Julie’d be a blast if you’re into quirky, low-key adventures with a side of witty banter and real talk. She’s not the life of every party, but she’d shine in smaller, weirder settings—flying you over a golden field, sketching a UFO landing in it, then debating whether aliens could be Lutheran. Her fun isn’t loud or flashy; it’s the kind that sneaks up on you, leaving you grinning at her oddball charm.