Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-05-11
Simon Willison highlights Jason Koebler's essay coining the term 'Zombie Internet' to describe the pervasive, mentally exhausting hybrid online ecosystem where humans and AI interact across social platforms, blogs, and comment threads.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-generated-contentzombie-internetonline-content-pollutionai-ethics
Claims
- AI-generated writing online has become so pervasive that filtering it is mentally exhausting for human readers.
- The 'Zombie Internet' is distinct from the 'Dead Internet' — it is not just bots talking to bots but a complex hybrid of humans, AI agents, and people using AI interacting with each other.
- Influencers and marketing firms are deliberately deploying automated AI accounts to spam social media, YouTube, and blogs for financial gain.
- AI writing styles are beginning to distort the writing patterns of ordinary human authors.
Key quotes
I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It's people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating 'AI agents' and then instructing them to interact with people.
It is whatever the fuck 'Moltbook' is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It's AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that's actually being run by a marketing firm.