AI and bots have officially taken over the internet

jruohonen

Well, IoT traffic peaked "human traffic" already long ago, Netflix etc. eat a lot of bandwidth, etc., so I am not sure where the news is exactly.

jve

> This notion of machine bad, human good just is not realistic Glad I found this quote. It is quite helpful for an AI to search the web on behaolf of me... even if it was finding where I can buy particular/similar peanuts locally I got from abroad.

nareyko

One interesting dynamic here is that AI increases content supply much faster than human attention grows. Which means filtering and ranking systems become the main bottleneck. That pushes platforms toward stronger algorithmic selection and sometimes stronger convergence of attention.

SanjayMehta

"Officially?" Who is this official making this pronouncement?

nclin_

Proposing a definition of slop: content optimized for profitability, regardless of quality. If AI slop is replacing the content you were consuming, it was already slop.

endymion-light

I view a lot of the AI/Bot internet to be slightly a false misnomer. Even before ChatGPT, the degredation of online content was already happening - SEO farms, worsening google search. Most articles you'd find online would be paywalled, most information about specific things would turn out to be a frustrating SEO labyrinth. The current one is awful, and there's so much AI/Bot content, but I can find far more detailed information using AI enabled search that isn't covered in ads. I can get an initial overview of methodology without trawling through SEO articles. I think AI has been almost a natural response to the enshittification of the internet - ChatGPT wouldn't seem so transformative if google search was working like google search rather than ad generator 5000 before it released.

BiteCode_dev

Bot traffic have been overtaking humans for a long time. Between crawler, spammers, fake accounts on all social media, automated scripts for API and various saas and botnets for various attacks... It's just that now the official numbers say so. But anyone on twitter or reddit can tell you the dead internet theory has been progressing at a swift pace for a decade. AI just made it more apparent.

incomingpain

Dead Internet theory came out around 2023. Playwright launched in 2020; similar projects have since launched; similar project existed before. It used to be automated by script, now you even have AI. We now have a dead internet. It's also important to understand what's happening. Why or what would the scripted bot be doing? It's not read, otherwise nobody would notice. They are actually posting things. It's not just posting cat pictures, nobody would notice that neither. Each bot has a different intention, but universally they all has mass intention to manipulate some subject. Reddit is bad because the bots have the power to curate content with downvotes. So online discussions have synthetic content intending to change opinions. How does that interact with the various subjects you're interested in? What's even crazier is the intersection of echo chambers and bots. There are people who have blocked essentially all humans and live in a world of bots who agree with them. It is causing insane social problems.