I've been on an Old School RuneScape kick. I started playing in 2007 when I was in third grade, and here I am, 17 years later, still playing. There's a saying in the community: "you don't quit, you just go AFK." Well, I relapsed.
In case you're not familiar with OSRS, a "world" is an instance of the game. Players on the same world can see each other in-game. Players on different worlds cannot. Helps distribute players among servers. For superficial reasons, World 420 is one of the more popular worlds. The fact that it's gated by 1,500 total level in the game, usually a few hundred hours of playtime, is a coincidence, but it keeps the bots out. But the result is interesting: a digital space with a thousand or so people almost completely separate from the bots and advertising. It's like a chatroom with a game attached.
With AI becoming so prevalent, there's a lot of talk of the internet dying. I know where those fears are coming from, because I see the sites I use dying a little bit more every day, whether that's subliminal astroturfing or obvious AI drivel. But some parts of the internet aren't changing. Even if that is bankstanding in a 25 year old medieval clicking game.
The more AI evolves the more likely it seems that it will be used to control groups of people rather than to help humanity as a whole. If AI gets regulated people in power would only get more powerful and if not it's likely the same would happen. Unless something really big happens I don't really see the future getting any better.
I don't think that AI will kill the internet, i think it will kill the wide web, but here, the small web will thrive. As more and more of the wide web becomes filled with sludge as it has been increasingly over the years, people are moving away from it, back to sites like neocities, message boards like this, the fediverse, everything that is resistant to advertisers and people with money, and everything that encourages creativity and freedom.
The internet is one of humanities biggest and most important inventions, it will never die, it will only change.