Are bots taking over the internet?

A report by cybersecurity specialists Imperva concludes that almost half of internet traffic already comes from non-human sources; that’s to say it’s initiated by the activity of bots.

Robots can now create content of all kinds, and consume it: from updates on social networks to news on media and music, fueling dumb schemes that move money flows based on even dumber metrics. I know that I am real, that it is me, and not some AI assistant, who writes all the articles on this site, and I also know that the vast majority of the comments in response to that content come from real people. Nevertheless, every day, Akismet stops a few dozen spam comments generated by bots, which, while they’re not really a problem, foreshadow where we’re headed.

Imperva’s research seemingly supports the Dead Internet theory, a conspiracy theory originally born in 4chan forums that claims that the internet consists fundamentally of automatically generated content and constant bot activity, all manipulated by algorithms that are part of a psy-op to control our minds.

In which case, we might ask where the line is between a human and a bot? I write and proofread my texts myself (as can be detected by the usual presence of the occasional typo), but if, for example, I edited them using a generative assistant to improve their grammar or style, or to limit my…