Baudrillard and the Dead Internet Theory. Revisiting Baudrillard’s (dis)trust in Artificial Intelligence

Abstract The goal of this paper is to revisit Baudrillard’s take on artificial intelligence and to present a critique of AI (especially considering large language models). Baudrillard expressed his skepticism about AI already in his essay Xerox and Infinity from 1993. To understand Baudrillard’s argumentation, it is necessary to open up his theoretical body of work, starting from Marxist value theory and leading up to his own concept of simulation theory, which he later became known for. Baudrillard’s main idea throughout his work is how the meaning of a sign, once emerging out of a social bond which he calls symbolic exchange, transfers into a sphere of representative signs that then morph into a life of their own. Baudrillard’s critique falls perfectly in line with the discussion around the dead internet theory and the loss of meaning within the virtual space through the rise of bots and artificially created content, stripped of human origin and connection. Artificial content is, for Baudrillard, the purest form of simulation, with signs that have lost their origin of representation and are now exponentially recreated in a digital sphere. Just like the AI-generated image of “Shrimp Jesus,” which flooded the social media platform Facebook and became a viral hit. “Shrimp Jesus” is a perfect example of an artificial image pushing human-generated content out of the virtual sphere. From a Baudrillardian perspective, that dead internet, the internet dying because of the flood of artificial content, is not an accident, but an inevitable event.