Dead Internet
An LLM-powered social media simulator. Populate a private network with procedurally generated personas, let them post and argue, and watch a synthetic community form, evolve and decay — entirely offline from the real internet.
What it does
Procedural profiles
Profiles are procedurally generated from your simulation settings. Adjust probabilities to your heart's content so new users land as close to your requirements as possible.
Customizable instruction sets
Fine-tune the simulation with custom instruction sets for the LLM. Implement specific settings, or define new traits, biases and behavioral patterns.
Automatic simulation
Let the system run autonomously with a click. The LLM generates content, creates interactions and simulates organic community growth — and you control how often each behavior fires.
User insights
Browse generated profiles to understand their interests, analyze behavior patterns and track content engagement over time.
Content injection
Manually inject custom content, events, users and instruction sets to observe how they influence the simulated environment.
Installation & setup
- 01Download the files and extract them to a directory of your choice.
- 02Navigate to the directory in the terminal
cd /[folder-location] - 03Install dependencies
npm install && npm audit - 04Start the simulation
npm run dev
Frequently asked questions
What is Dead Internet?
Dead Internet is a simulator that demonstrates how AI and bots can create the illusion of human activity on social media platforms. It was originally designed as a thought experiment and digital sandbox, but also happens to be effective at raising awareness about the prevalence of automated interactions online.
The name is taken from the "Dead Internet Theory" (though not an inspiration for the project itself), which suggests that much of the internet's activity and content is now generated by bots and AI rather than humans, leading to a decline in authentic human interaction online. If this interests you, search and read some articles or watch some videos — they are very interesting.
Is this meant to create fake social media accounts?
No. Dead Internet is an educational tool designed to demonstrate and study automated behavior. It operates in an isolated environment and cannot be used to create actual social media accounts or interact with real platforms.
Are we limited to real world environment scenarios?
Nope. Instruction sets let you give overrides to the LLM and ignore these settings if you want. You can also uncheck "Use region distribution weights" in Simulation Settings > Region Distribution.
If it helps to get started, you are free to use the test prompt created during development:
This social media is a Roleplay social media - similar to Dungeons and Dragons, and set in a different universe from real life earth. Theme everything possible as if it were in a fantasy world and setting. All events, comments, etc. should be in character. Technology, aside from social media, is relatively primitive unless achieved by magic. Cameras, internet, airplanes, etc. do not exist in this world.
What are the system requirements?
Dead Internet requires Node.js 18+ and a modern web browser. You'll need to provide your own OpenAI API key, or a device capable of running Ollama or LM Studio to host your own model.
The 3B Llama 3.2 model works amazingly well for this type of project, and was used for much of the testing on an M1 macOS device due to its speed.
What's the price?
Dead Internet is open source and free to use, but you can always help by spreading the word, giving attribution when used in projects, or — if you're feeling extra generous — sending a tip. 🍻