Am I Talking to You, or ChatGPT?

Five years ago, people who hang out in the stranger corners of the web started arguing that the internet was mostly fake. It had been this way since about 2016, they said, when Google introduced its artificial neural network for machine translation. Supposedly, from that point forward, online interactions began to be replaced, until nearly every message and picture had been posted by a bot. Everywhere you looked, websites were “empty and devoid of people,” as one scholar of the theory put it.This wasn’t true, but the core idea was tethered to a real phenomenon. Even way back then, in 2021, social platforms were awash in fake views, fake likes, fake traffic, and fake engagement. Some people figured that automation might one day take over the entire web and then our world. They were mostly being silly, or paranoid. Today they seem like … prophets?“Dead Internet” theory is seeing a revival, this time in mainstream conversation. It’s no longer strange to think that AI might be everywhere, edging out all forms of human interaction: bots talking to bots, all the way down. Every week we seem to take another step in that direction. In June, the Pew Research Center reported that nearly a quarter of American adults now use chatbots every day. Two months later, OpenAI announced an official ChatGPT integration for iMessage. Chatbot-generated text is already widely used for website filler, business emails, and cover letters. Will it soon be commonplace in private messages between friends and family?Read: Maybe you missed it, but the internet ‘died’ in 2016The ChatGPT-iMessage integration works on your desktop, not your phone. It doesn’t send messages on your behalf until you’ve reviewed and approved its suggestions. A similar plug-in has long been available for Anthropic’s Claude, and many messaging apps already offer AI-suggested replies. To some extent, OpenAI’s new product simply formalizes something that people had been doing on their own, either by pasting text from one window to another, or by improvising personal ChatGPT-linking software. (The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)“Low-effort communication has always existed,” Michael Pfister, a software developer living in Colorado, told me. He said that he had already vibe coded his own version of the iMessage tool months ago. ChatGPT pings him daily to let him know if he’s missed any important questions in his group chat. He tried having it write a text to his friends, just as an experiment, but they immediately noticed that the message was AI. “They tried to prompt-inject me,” he said: They asked the agent what Michael thought of them, in the hopes of tricking it into sharing his private thoughts. He told me that he mostly uses the tool for work and that he isn’t interested in having AI communicate with his friends on his behalf in the future. “I think relationships are experiential,” he said.Max Weinbach, an analyst at a market-research firm in Connecticut, told me he uses ChatGPT to text with his bosses about work. “It just makes life easy,” he said. It’s hardly different from using Google’s suggested email responses, which have been available for nearly a decade. Weinbach had no ethical qualms about switching to LLM-assisted communication, although he recognizes that it can be taken as a sign of disrespect. “It’s not accepted or polite,” he said. “It’s just kind of a rude thing to do.”These two are on the bleeding edge, yet exhibiting more restraint than some others. All over Reddit, my favorite repository for human drama, people are worrying about human drama that has a nonhuman interloper. New posts appear each day requesting help in figuring out whether something might have been created with AI: Is this apartment listing real? What about this dating-app profile? What about this video of a cute animal doing something amazing? (A bobcat flagging down a biker to help her rescue her kitten from the bottom of a random hole?)Many of the requests have a moralistic tone, and the poster comes to the crowd solemnly, with hesitation, because they know the truth may be painful. The most fraught discussions concern AI-generated personal messages. Guys on dating apps are using the technology. Sometimes long-term partners, friends, siblings, or parents do it too. “Is this text apology written by ChatGPT?” someone will ask. Or “Did my mother use ChatGPT to write me a text of support on the morning of my divorce?” The implication is betrayal.I spoke with Melissa Crowder, a 47-year-old from Alberta, Canada, who shared her own experience with AI texting in a July post on Reddit. She’d spent all day having a “nice conversation” with a match from the dating app Feeld, then finally noticed that their repartee was off when he copy-pasted her own message back to her by mistake. At that point she realized all of his previous messages had been structurally similar—usually two paragraphs of text followed by a question on a single line. And he’d been using the word dangerously way too much. When she asked if he was using ChatGPT, he replied, “Busted” with a bunch of emoji, which also struck her as something ChatGPT might do. “I’m like, this is still ChatGPT.” Then he unmatched her.Crowder would not have been that mad if the guy had just fessed up and said something normal in his own voice. She sometimes uses AI tools to help her express herself too. She said she has a tendency to ramble on and overexplain her feelings, so she’ll use a site called Goblin Tools to self-edit. She might make a message to her ex-husband “Less emotional” (one of the choices in a drop-down menu) and get straight to the point. She also has a friend who sends AI-written texts from time to time. “Where I would draw my line is where you take the person out of the conversation,” she said. “If I’m vibing with a chatbot and then I meet the person in real life, what is that conversation going to look like?”For a recent paper, a group of researchers from the University of Washington and Arizona State University studied two popular Reddit forums—r/RealOrAI and r/isthisAI—to figure out how people go about determining which material is AI-generated and which is not. The most common mode of analysis evaluates the fundamental plausibility of an image or a video. (“Babies do not nearly have that much coordination to both be standing up, talking so well and holding up that large cat.”) A smaller number of comments in the study addressed some alleged telltale signs of AI-style texting, including the prevalence of “overly ornate but meaningless phrases.” Other people have noted LLMs’ overreliance on certain words (delve is an oft-noted one), sentence structures (negative parallelisms), and punctuation (em dashes).The paper ends in an ominous tone. “Our findings suggest that people are developing mental models of what AI-generated content looks like, built on personal experiences and beliefs developed over time,” the authors wrote, before arguing that these mental models were unlikely to be accurate for long. The LLMs will evolve and stop doing the things that now make their output so easy to spot. In fact, the tricks enumerated in the paper are already getting old, one of the paper’s authors, Tina Yeung, told me. “I definitely think this is a snapshot in time,” she said.The mere fact of people’s concern about AI, and their anxiety over its incursion into day-to-day life, may be a snapshot too. Perhaps the stigma that now exists around using ChatGPT to text a friend or message on a dating app will fade in the years ahead. Maybe one day it will disappear altogether, and even our phones will end up empty and devoid of people. Or else I guess it’s possible—just possible—that the Dead Internet theory is as silly as it ever was.