2025-07-31
22 分钟Welcome to The Explanation from the BBC World Service.
I'm Roz Atkins and this is The Media Show.
We're here to explain the trends behind the fast-changing media landscape.
This week on The Media Show, has AI already ruined the internet?
Some fear it has, or at least it will do.
They're calling it... dead internet theory.
The idea that AI slop and fake news have overtaken content created by humans.
We'll find out what all of this means and meet those working to stop it becoming a reality.
And CNN's Christiane Ammampour joins us.
We'll hear why she's made the pivot to podcasting and we'll get her take on the state of journalism.
The internet revolutionised how we live and part of that was a radical change in how easily we could access information.
AI brings another revolution in how content is created and consumed.
Machines now write news articles, but are we approaching the point when AI's slop,
as it's sometimes called, overwhelms everything else?
Dead internet theory is the idea that it might.
And that's the starting point for our discussion.
Our first guest was Alex Hearn, AI writer at The Economist.
So the dead internet theory was actually an idea before its time.
Although we now are thinking of it in this AI context,
it dates back four or so years ago to a period when social media was over not really by AI bots,