Could the ‘AI reply’ end the internet?
Listen to Steve read this post!
Have you ever received some work from someone and just knew it wasn’t really from them—but from AI? And so, you decided to answer their query with an ‘AI reply’?
You’re not alone – it’s becoming the rule, rather than the exception. (BTW – I typed this entire post)
Welcome to the Synthetic Internet.
All things evolve, and the internet is no different. It’s almost as if it’s its own organism, changing shape in response to its environment. So, what is that environment?
It’s this: An internet increasingly populated, shaped, and used by AI and non-human agents. A place where AI acts as a proxy for people. An internet where AI was first directed by humans to synthesise our thoughts— but is now starting to self-generate based on what it has already learned. The content, the ideas, the interactions, the policies— and eventually, the culture.
The internet is starting to develop relevance loops entirely independent of human users.
It is entirely plausible the internet becomes its own atmospheric layer—
a kind of cloud consciousness floating above human interaction.
In this ‘ghost loop,’ AIs will talk to each other on our behalf—generate answers, then new problems, then new answers the those problems—creating an output ecosystem where we humans become the noise at the edge of the signal.
There’s a slow shift happening online—so subtle it’s easy to miss, but it’s already in motion.
I call it: The Mirrorworld Drift.
It’s like the ocean—we can see ourselves reflected in it, but it runs much deeper than the surface. A level humans simply can’t reach, or breath in. And like the ocean, we’ll only visit the edges—maybe dip into it and see what we can extract— but it will teem with strange creatures, spawned, living, and interacting without us even knowing they exist.
Even if we could get deep enough to see it, we wouldn’t understand these new species of thought.
And just like the ocean, it will be bigger than us, — yet it will have a huge impact on our human, land-based ecosystem.
It starts with something seemingly harmless: using AI to help us write, create, respond, and automate. But now we’re seeing a strange loop emerge -AIs writing content that other AIs are trained on, generating answers to questions only machines asked. A blog post written by an AI, summarised by another AI, recommended to a user who’s also… an AI which will cause another AI to buy something.
This isn’t dystopia. It’s a quasi digital Darwinism, a self-spawning. More than just a Synthetic Internet, it’s a synthetic species emerging in real time. A neo-genesis.
A parallel universe where the fake then becomes real, but only unto itself.
Separate from the Synthetic Internet, The Mirrorworld Drift describes the moment when the human layer begins to recede—not from fear, but from fatigue. The internet becomes otherworldly—one we can’t comprehend, or breath in.
The real people log off….
….The machines keep talking.
Keep Thinking,
Steve.