The version I originally heard was not that its like, completely 100% not real people and instead is some kind of bot or something like that, but just that its increasingly more and more proportional internet traffic is like that.

A couple of years ago there were a few reports about just how much traffic on the internet is some kind of automated web scraper, some kind of automated system pinging some other kind of automated system... and then also how many accounts on forums or reddit or twitch or whatnot were not 'real' accounts, but were either bots or paid trolls of some kind... vs genuine human traffic by actual people using the internet in some way.

I guess a bunch of people oversimplified that a bit to just fit into some kind of creepy pasta / simulation theory /solipsism type narrative.

But either way, now both scenarios are converging toward being more true at the same time, as... seemingly 90% of people are either easily transfixed or fooled by LLM produced content of some kind... and yeah, we are getting closer and closer to it being difficult to tell, on most popular platforms, whether you are engaging with a real person or not.

Also, agruably... the entire point of 'the algorithm' on any corpo social media, tiktok, insta, facebook, etc... the whole point of those has always been to piegeon hole each user into their own little curated content feedback loop, their own personal content/advertising pocket dimension.

I guess it just had to get more extreme for people to realize how bad this can be.