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Humans share the web equally with bots, report warns amid fears of ‘dead internet’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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But is the Internet dying? The thing it doesn't say is if the human participation is dwindling.
To keep it simple, I'll work with small numbers. Imagine there are 10 humans online. Now imagine 1 bot on online. Bots are 9% (1 in 11) of this imaginary online community. A year later, those same 10 humans are still online, but there are now 10 bots online; the bots are 50% of the community. This statistic can lead you to think there is less human participation when nothing happened to the humans. The difference is the raw number of bots. This is what I believe is happening, about the same number of humans, just an increasing number of bots, scraping, posting, etc.
X/Twitter is dying because of mismanagement.
Let's extend this thought experiment a little. Consider just forum posts; the numbers will be somewhat similar for articles and other writings, as well as photos and videos.
A bot creates how many more posts than a human? Being (ridiculously) conservative, we'll say 10x more.
On day one: 10 humans are posting (for simplicity's sake) 10 times a day, totaling 100 posts. Bot is posting 100 a day. For a total of 200 human and bot posts; 50% of which are the bot.
In your (extended) example, at the end of a year: 10 humans are still posting 100 times a day. The 10 bots are posting a total of 1000 times a day. Bots are at 90%, humans 10%.
This statistic can lead you to think human participation in the Internet is difficult to find.
Returning to reality, consider how inhuman AI bots are, with each probably able to outpost humans by millions or billions of times under millions of aliases each. If you find search engines, articles, forums, reviews, and such are bonkers now, just wait a few years. Predicting general chaotic nonsense for the Internet is a rational conclusion, with very few islands of humanity. Unless bots are stopped.
Right now though, bots are increasing.
Bots are increasing. But the Internet is not dead/dying, just changing. Many of the "The 10 bots are posting a total of 1000 times a day." are repost bots merely parroting human generated content.
I wonder, though, if this will cause the scrapers to be impacted by the reposters or other AI generated content.
You’re taking the word “dying” too literally
So change means "dying"? So every time a tadpole evolves into a frog, a tadpole dies? Should we have protest signs that read, "FROGS KILL TADPOLES! DOWN WITH FROGS"?
But what if I wanted to communicate with humans instead of propaganda-bots? Then yes, that Internet is dead, and there's no real fucking reason to be on most of those sites.
No, that is not what I was talking about. In the current environment it is completely possible for some people to only have interactions with bots online, without even knowing. This may get worse and worse in the future. THAT is what “dead” internet implies, lifeless online interactions essentially.
I suspect there will still be online interactions with humans, just more interactions with bots. Unfortunately, it's we humans behind the mess. Even if we pass laws to stop it (or even forced labels of "I'm a bot" on bot accounts), some people won't play by the rules. So the change is going to happen. We can try to persuade the public, but we know how well that works:
So what do you propose be done about it?