Anyone who has performed a Google search, posed a query to ChatGPT, or made a purchase on Amazon has interacted with a bot -- a piece of software that runs automated tasks. If you use digital technology, bots influence your life on a daily basis. Bot activity accounted for 49.6 percent of all internet traffic in 2023, according to a report by cybersecurity company Imperva.
Like bacteria in the human body, there are good bots that serve useful and even essential functions. Web crawlers such as Googlebot index websites for search engines, chatbots answer complex questions and draft emails, and transaction bots verify your credit card details when you buy a product online. Despite the service of these helpful bots, most bot activity on the internet is harmful. "Bad" bots accounted for 32 percent of all internet traffic in 2023, compared with 17.6 percent for "good" bots, Imperva found.
Bad bots engage in mischief -- from extracting data from websites without permission to outright criminal activities, including fraud and theft. Scalper bots scoop up limited-availability items and resell them at a higher price. Cybercriminals use sophisticated, versatile bots for a wide range of nefarious activities such as credit card fraud and gaining illegal access to user accounts.
Advertisers pay money to show ads to real human users, so the question of how many X users are actually bots is critical to the company's business model. The true percentage is anyone's guess. This author has had the experience of being swarmed by "fake" followers after setting up new accounts on X. These followers are easily identifiable as bots because they were all created in 2023 and 2024, they have unusual usernames containing strings of random numbers, they all have female profile pictures, and they never post any comments.
While the purpose of these unwanted bot followers is unclear, many social media users -- including businesses, politicians, and entertainers -- purchase fake or automated followers to boost their perceived social influence and online engagement. Bot accounts have also become a notable factor in political discourse, with political campaigns and foreign governments deploying armies of bots to manipulate online discussions and amplify certain narratives.
The increasing prevalence of bot users and machine-generated content has fueled debate about how much of the internet is actually fake. The "dead internet theory," which emerged in the late 2010s and has drawn renewed attention in recent years, posits that bots and AI have essentially taken over the internet, making it a synthetic, inhuman space where the vast majority of activity is driven by algorithms rather than people.
Proponents of the dead internet theory claim that most of the content, entertainment, news, and people that we encounter on the internet are fabricated by software -- for example, that many YouTube personalities are in fact AI-generated videos, or "deepfakes." While that probably isn't true, the growing sophistication and rapid deployment of AI models make it easy to imagine a future scenario in which the internet is totally overwhelmed by worthless computer-generated content.