The rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, along with the surge in AI-generated online content, has given more credibility to a decades-old conspiracy theory known as the Dead Internet Theory. It holds that most of the content we encounter online isn’t actually produced by living humans but by lifeless bots.

AI is increasingly turning the once-fringe theory into a reality, but even today, at least one of the participants—the living, breathing observer browsing the web on the other side of the screen—is still usually a real, sentient being.

Yet this may not be true for much longer. Thanks to AI systems’ increasing reliance on a technology known as headless browsing, artificial intelligence is becoming a primary consumer of the internet. And if that happens at scale, the internet

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