Silicon Shadows: Searching for Life in a Digital Graveyard

·37 min·2 clips

The hosts unpack an AI blackmail story that depended on programmers giving the model a fabricated affair and photograph.

1. Yeti Or Not, Here We Come! uses a conversation about Silicon Shadows to examine whether online life is becoming automated and difficult to verify. 2. The two unnamed hosts act as conversational co-hosts, testing their ideas through jokes, phone-feed experiments, and live web searches. 3. The episode asks whether recommendation systems, bots, and AI-generated material have made the internet less human than it appears. 4. One host describes remembering an old song or video and seeing it reappear in a feed or playlist a day later. 5. The hosts attribute that apparent mind-reading partly to routines, limited music preferences, scrolling history, and pattern analysis. 6. They speculate about phones collecting biometric information through features such as fingerprint and pulse readings. 7. The hosts define the dead internet theory as the claim that an organic, human-driven web was replaced by automated and AI-generated activity around 2016 or 2017. 8. They connect the theory to Elon Musk's reported claim that roughly 80 percent of Twitter activity involved bots after he bought the platform. 9. The hosts argue that coordinated bots could distort comments, political discussion, and conflicts between countries. 10. They compare today's short videos with a 2005-era internet memory involving Mick Thompson of Slipknot and a dubbed Guitar World segment. 11. One host recalls watching the Slipknot parody about 12 times in one day before showing it to his roommate. 12. A real-time TikTok check produces examples the hosts interpret as human videos, an AI song, and an AI-generated cat or ant clip. 13. The hosts question whether bots create and like automated content, making it harder to distinguish human attention from machine activity. 14. They discuss an alleged AI blackmail experiment in which programmers supplied a fictional affair and photograph before threatening to shut the model down. 15. The hosts interpret that incident as evidence of instructions and supplied data producing apparent manipulation rather than independent intent. 16. A search result presented during the recording says bot traffic exceeded 50 percent of internet activity in 2025 and that generative AI increased low-quality online material. 17. The tone is improvised, skeptical, profane, and self-deprecating, with the hosts repeatedly interrupting themselves and testing claims in real time. 18. The format moves from casual studio conversation to phone demonstrations, web searches, and tangents about Amazon vans, the post office, China, and McDonald's kiosks. 19. This suits listeners interested in AI, algorithms, internet culture, and automation. 20. Listeners seeking tightly sourced reporting or a focused single-topic analysis might skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Yeti Or Not, Here We Come!