Are Bots Taking Over the Internet?

A report by cybersecurity specialists Imperva concludes that almost half of internet traffic already comes from non-human sources; that’s to say it’s initiated by the activity of bots.

Robots can now create content of all kinds, and consume it: from updates on social networks to news on media and music, fueling dumb schemes that move money flows based on even dumber metrics. I know that I am real, that it is me, and not some AI assistant, who writes all the articles on this site, and I also know that the vast majority of the comments in response to that content come from real people. Nevertheless, every day, Akismet stops a few dozen spam comments generated by bots, which, while they’re not really a problem, foreshadow where we’re headed.

Imperva’s research seemingly supports the Dead Internet theory, a conspiracy theory originally born in 4chan forums that claims that the internet consists fundamentally of automatically generated content and constant bot activity, all manipulated by algorithms that are part of a psy-op to control our minds.

In which case, we might ask where the line is between a human and a bot? I write and proofread my texts myself (as can be detected by the usual presence of the occasional typo), but if, for example, I edited them using a generative assistant to improve their grammar or style, or to limit my sometimes convoluted multi-subordinate sentences, would that qualify as content created by me or by a bot? I don’t, but what if I did?

As technology evolves, it is easier than ever to create fake accounts with an image that is not even stolen, but simply generated, with a “personality” and able to express the opinions is has been assigned. The same applies to deepfakes and all kinds of content designed to be unquestioningly consumed and shared, which offers more and more opportunities to polarize opinion. This doesn’t really validate the dead internet theory, but it certainly gives us something to think about, particularly in regard to bad actors and the misuse of metrics.

So, if half the internet effectively a dead zone controlled by bots, we can still focus on pages and content that we know is generated and discussed by real people. But the reality is not so simple: if this criterion is shared by the majority of the population, given that many people are easily duped by content and activity “that seems genuine” but that is easily exposed as fake, we can only wonder what will happen as that content and that activity is colonized by bots that are increasingly sophisticated and able to mimic human behavior.

As ever, we find ourselves in a situation where technology is being used to generate new problems and also to solve them. Is there any hope that the algorithms of the future will be able to separate deepfakes from real content, or texts written by human beings from those generated by other algorithms, along with images that never existed from others that were captured by a flesh and blood photographer? Or have we already passed that point?

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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