Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet

Remember job applications? You know, you’d write a résumé and a cover letter. Someone would read them. You’d fish out a tasteful button-down and try to charm your interviewer. Maybe your one-liner or a question about your amateur bowling career would help you score the position. Maybe you’d never hear back.

That’s all changing. When Christian Vinson applied for jobs in finance this year, he knew he was really auditioning for artificial intelligence. Many companies now use screening software to sift through piles of applications, so he spent close to 10 hours teaching two A.I. chatbots about his work experience. He filled in details about his education, a banking internship and five years in the Army. He then prompted the bots to tailor his cover letter to hundreds of job listings.

A.I. had written his applications, and A.I. was reading them too — a dog chasing its own tail. “This is the new normal,” says Vinson, 30, who landed a job at an investment bank in New York.

We live in a world in which A.I. tools have found their way to the center of a staggering number of professional, academic and personal interactions. Lately these chatbots and agents have been doing more than just talking to us. Students are writing essays with ChatGPT, and teachers are using A.I. to grade them. Workers are sending lengthy A.I.-generated emails to colleagues, who are responding with walls of chatbot text of their own. A.I podcast hosts are holding forth with A.I. podcast guests on topics like gas prices, the Iran war — and artificial intelligence. Tech wants to take all this even further: In March, Meta acquired a social network designed for bots to talk to one another.

The dead internet theory, a concept popular in tech circles, holds that most digital traffic will eventually be software, leaving humans as a minority voice. We may now have a corollary of that prediction — let’s call it a bot loop — when the humans on both sides of an interaction hand over their role to artificial intelligence. These recursive exchanges can be eerie and error-prone, a single mistake bouncing back and forth uncorrected over and over. Stranger still, they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.

Depending on whom you ask, bot loops might be banal, dystopian or genuinely useful. No matter how people feel about them, researchers say we’re going to see bot loops much more often as we deputize A.I. systems to do our bidding.