Menschen teilen das Web jetzt gleichermaßen mit Bots, warnt ein Bericht aus Angst vor dem „toten Internet“ | Websites wie Twitter/X wurden von automatisierten Konten überschwemmt
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/dead-internet-web-bots-humans-b2530324.html
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„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.“
„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.
“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.”
I don’t think this is anything new. I just think that people are becoming more aware of it.
Twitter had a huge bot problem long before Musk bought the company, but people seemed hesitant to bring that up because they liked the site. Once Musk bought it people immediately began complaining, and strangely a lot of the complaints came before he even closed the deal on the company and took it over.
I am just a duck-billed Platypus who learned to read and type in English by accident while working at the library and was able to get my first book published by the University of libraries.
Important to reflect on how the profit-drive of our own economy pushes us towards noise and not information. Headlines warn against foreign actors etc but we’re mired first and foremost in the bog of business. Bots were never needed to improve lives but we sit watching them get developed. AI that can generate fake videos was never needed to improve lives but we sit watching them get developed.
Guy Debord anticipates a lot of this in *The Society of the Spectacle*. Our economy rests on the circulation of commodities which are so separated from their origins (exploitation of labour, destruction of the environment, etc, are all hidden when you look at the finished iPhone) as to be basically fake, lying objects. You cannot have a real, truth-focussed society when it rests on such abstraction. Commodity-dependent society must become like the commodity: dumb and disconnected from reality. Our history, our context, must become as blank as that of the objects we worship.
We are being unpeeled from reality because the alternative would be a costly confrontation with it. An iPhone would cost $20,000 if everybody involved in the production received the equivalent of average Western wages. Probably much much more if environmental destruction were costed in. Ruling interests are very keen to put off that sort of confrontation.
If the profit motive remains as an organising principle in society we must always anticipate this sort of noise-making. It is as cordyceps for the ant colony. How do we cut it out?
Sort of how so much of reddit is bot generated garbage data mining?
The joys of going public and needing to milk users for even more data. Only a matter of time before this site becomes all but unusable, I fear.