Published July 12th, 2026 - 12:19 GMT
ALBAWABA - Online communities are facing content quality decreases as AI becomes more invasive and as the dead internet theory slowly becomes reality.Programming and tech online communities and hubs such as Stack Overflow are experiencing an acute decline in their number of ‘expert’ users on the site, the latter citing that they are ‘underappreciated’ as AI becomes the center of enquiries on the website.One study forecasts that the issue will not be restricted to coding communities alone; but is threatening to spill over to the rest of the internet and even into the real world piece by piece.Classrooms, offices, and other research-oriented communities are facing the fire line next as AI becomes a free, fast, and efficient substitute for decision making experts. "If everybody can create a good quality response or output using AI, some people may think, 'Why should I make an effort to share my expertise and participate?", publisher of the study Dr. Kenny Ching explained.The problem arises with the so-called ‘knowledge reset’ which comes at the point where AI won’t have any new data inputs from experts to train itself as more and more of them leave the website.With this in mind, researchers wonder how AI will increase its knowledge without data to learn from, with some suggesting that it will turn to different avenues to increase its knowledge, places such as Slack chats and Discord servers.Still speculation abounds as to whether this would be an effective replacement for expert human data and knowledge.
