Humans now share the web equally with bots, according to a major new report – as some fear that the internet is dying.
In recent months, the so-called “dead internet theory” has gained new popularity. It suggests that much of the content online is in fact automatically generated, and that the number of humans on the web is dwindling in comparison with bot accounts.
Now a new report from cyber security company Imperva suggests that it is increasingly becoming true. Nearly half, 49.6 per cent, of all internet traffic came from bots last year, its “Bad Bot Report” indicates.
That is up 2 per cent in comparison with last year, and is the highest number ever seen since the report began in 2013.
In some countries, the picture is worse. In Ireland, 71 per cent of internet traffic is automated, it said.
Some of that rise is the result of the adoption of generative artificial intelligence and large language models. Companies that build those systems use bots scrape the internet and gather data that can then be used to train them.
Some of those bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Imperva warned. More and more of them come from residential internet connections, which makes them look more legitimate.
“Automated bots will soon surpass the proportion of internet traffic coming from humans, changing the way that organizations approach building and protecting their websites and applications,” said Nanhi Singh, general manager for application security at Imperva. “As more AI-enabled tools are introduced, bots will become omnipresent.”
The widespread use of bots has already caused problems for online services such as X, formerly known as Twitter. Popular posts on the site are now hit by a huge number of comments from accounts advertising pornography, and the company appears to be struggling to limit them.
Recently, its owner Elon Musk said that the site would start charging users to send posts and interact with others. That was the only way of stopping the proliferation of automated accounts, he said.
But X is far from the only site to be hit by automated content that is posing as real. Many similar posts are spreading across Facebook and TikTok, for instance.
That’s why I prefer smaller communities. Like, not lemmy-small, I mean actual small. 10-15 people. Haven’t seen any bots in those.
I read recently about the “Dark Forest Internet” theory where people are doing exactly what you’re talking about; retreating to small groups on Discord, email chains, texts, shit like that because the wider public Internet has become a bot/propaganda hellscape. I know it’s become more common for me also.
“Splinternet” and “cyber-Balkanisation / internet Balkanisation” are some other terms for it, for anyone else wanting to read into it!
It’s definitely more common for me, too. There’s a greater sense of community, and it just feels more personal and less hostile than most of the wider internet does. Smaller groups are much more able to hold each other accountable and self-moderate, too.
I think small internet groups have existed for a long time and will always do in different forms, for example they moved from Skype to Whatsapp or equivalents.
Reminds me of the Small Web
My new hobby in 2034 is going to be making irl friends, getting in thier private group chat, and then replacing myself with a bot. They’ll never see it coming.
Good to plan out ahead. Don’t want to rush into it
I wonder what percentage of these bots actually add content to the internet though
I can believe 50% of traffic is bots, I can’t believe any more than 5-10% of that is not just running exploit scripts, scrapers or very simple engagement farming (e.g. load page, press like).
I might have the wrong impression, but “Bot” in average Joe’s vocabulary seems to imply this kind of astroturfing (often not actually a bot) or spambot type of bot, not any kind of non-human request like how Imperva are (correctly) using it.
Yeah this headline is incredibly misleading. “Humans share the Internet equally with bots” at least heavily implies that 50% of content is created by bots, which is obviously not (yet?) the case.
At least read the copy/pasted text in the post body.
I did - the headline is still misleading. Headlines aren’t supposed to be misleading, the article itself being clear doesn’t change that.
Oh no.
Anyways
Bots, no matter how useful, should be banned from the internet. I don’t care if mods are lazy.
Bro a web server is a bot that only responds to incoming requests
You talking about banning the whole internet
That’s ignoring what we as a collective imply with the word “bot” and as a whole we all know that “bot” refers to generative content from a machine posing as a human when used in this context.
That’s not the context the parent used the term in either
How difficult would this be to enforce though?
I think the crux of the problem is how do you get a better-than-captcha system. An interesting, but probably not a fix-all way proposed in the past was to require every email to use a large number of computations, basically making spam/mass emailing too costly to send. It would be super interesting to see a community based on this concept, IMO.
