Report: AI The end of the internet as we knew it

The internet is now saturated with AI-generated content. Images, texts, music, videos: a continuous stream of automated productions floods the platforms. While these technologies initially promised creativity and sharing, they now seem to threaten the very essence of the web: knowledge, authenticity, and reliability.

Compared to the invention of writing or printing, the birth of the internet opened unprecedented access to knowledge and culture. But faced with the massive proliferation of synthetic content – sometimes empty, misleading, or purely commercial – some experts are predicting the end of the internet as we know it.

This phenomenon, nicknamed slop (literally "porridge"), can be found everywhere:

• Automated books for sale on Amazon,
• large-scale generated music pieces on Spotify,
• catchy but empty videos on Facebook,
• virtual influencers promoting products on TikTok.

How did the Web, once a symbol of shared knowledge, come to become a machine for producing misinformation and worthless content?

A documentary that examines the potential pitfalls of AI

In this captivating yet disturbing film, German journalist and director Mario Sixtus explores the dizzying new capabilities of AI.

In particular, it shows how it is now possible:

• to create a complete video from a single sentence,
• or to publish a book on Amazon without any human actually having written it… or even read it.

The documentary gives a voice to:

• Evan Ratliff, podcaster who created his own digital clone; ;
• an underpaid Kenyan worker, tasked with training and correcting the AI; ;
• several digital specialists and web researchers.

Although some sequences in the film use AI, Mario Sixtus highlights an essential point: behind the machine, human work remains indispensable – but it often remains hidden, precarious, or even ignored.

What future for a free and authentic Web?

By revisiting the history of the Internet, from a utopian project championed by hippie communities to its appropriation by tech giants, the film poses a fundamental question:

Is the dream of a free, open and creative Web disappearing?

Or are there still spaces where knowledge, culture and solidarity circulate?

ARTE documentary