As much as I think this is a huge problem, the Imperva Report is not ideal evidence for the power of bots to shape narratives. Google's web-scraping for their search engine is a bot, and counted as "internet traffic". So too is all the data gathering to train the AI systems. Web traffic is not a good metric to use to estimate the prevalence of AI activity on the internet; far too much of it is people downloading content for various uses, not active.
(Having said that, I think the fact more than half of the traffic on the internet is bots of various sorts is troubling for a number of reasons. Among them is the sheer waste of resources and energy this implies is happening; and the fact that apparently none of the tech giants, who have to maintain huge amounts of bandwidth and server capacity to deal with traffic, seems to have a way to do anything about it. That is troubling for many reasons for the future of the internet.)
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branchandroot
Re: Long Covid?
Date: 2025-04-24 07:52 pm (UTC)(Having said that, I think the fact more than half of the traffic on the internet is bots of various sorts is troubling for a number of reasons. Among them is the sheer waste of resources and energy this implies is happening; and the fact that apparently none of the tech giants, who have to maintain huge amounts of bandwidth and server capacity to deal with traffic, seems to have a way to do anything about it. That is troubling for many reasons for the future of the internet.)