Jul 13, 2026 · 34 min · 7 segments
The term “Dead Internet Theory” was first used in 2021 on a message board in the depths of the internet. It’s not a hugely auspicious start for a concept that, only 5 years later, would be discussed…
Shlomit WagmanGuestDee ReddyHostAI hasn't made criminals exceptionally smart or geniuses overnight or anything like that.
What it has done is it's made ordinary fraudsters much more convincing and much more productive.
So the main difference which AI has made is it's made fraud, running fraud and running scams much more accessible.
Okay, so what's actually changed? How has the technology developed to make that more accessible?
There's a kind of a couple of key things which AI has enabled criminals to do a lot more easily than they could do in the past.
So I suppose a very obvious one is around writing, so around crafting emails.
This kind of goes back to, you know, the classic contact via Nigerian prince scam, where, you know, you would receive a, a ridiculous email, which might look very obviously fake, but it might, say, con one person out of 1,000 or out of 100,000.
So maybe 10 or 20 years ago, a scammer could have spent hours trying to write one convincing email, and if their native language wasn't English, it might have taken longer.
Whereas now, AI means they can produce, you know, 1,000 personalized emails in just a single minute.
AI has enabled criminals to generate audio, uh, which sounds very convincing of people, and that's often used in scams.
And then another interesting one is criminals are now creating deepfake videos.
So there's a few different other ways which criminals might use AI, but these are some of the most common and most important methods that they use.
Yeah, this idea of realistic synthetic videos, I mean, it's something that people are seeing more and more in their everyday life.
They're crowding your social media feeds, whether for entertainment or indeed more malignant reasons.
AI hasn't made criminals exceptionally smart or geniuses overnight or anything like that.
What it has done is it's made ordinary fraudsters much more convincing and much more productive.
So the main difference which AI has made is it's made fraud, running fraud and running scams much more accessible.
Okay, so what's actually changed? How has the technology developed to make that more accessible?
There's a kind of a couple of key things which AI has enabled criminals to do a lot more easily than they could do in the past.
So I suppose a very obvious one is around writing, so around crafting emails.
This kind of goes back to, you know, the classic contact via Nigerian prince scam, where, you know, you would receive a, a ridiculous email, which might look very obviously fake, but it might, say, con one person out of 1,000 or out of 100,000.
So maybe 10 or 20 years ago, a scammer could have spent hours trying to write one convincing email, and if their native language wasn't English, it might have taken longer.
Whereas now, AI means they can produce, you know, 1,000 personalized emails in just a single minute.
AI has enabled criminals to generate audio, uh, which sounds very convincing of people, and that's often used in scams.
And then another interesting one is criminals are now creating deepfake videos.
So there's a few different other ways which criminals might use AI, but these are some of the most common and most important methods that they use.
Yeah, this idea of realistic synthetic videos, I mean, it's something that people are seeing more and more in their everyday life.
They're crowding your social media feeds, whether for entertainment or indeed more malignant reasons.
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