LEILA FADEL, HOST:
There are more bots online than humans. So our colleagues at the Indicator from Planet Money asked, what does an Internet without humans look like? Here's Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Erin Kissane has been online since the '90s.
ERIN KISSANE: I am a writer and researcher who focuses on the social internet and what it might be doing to us.
WONG: Lately, though, the internet has felt more impersonal. Like when Erin recently hired an estate lawyer, she suspected that he used an AI chatbot.
KISSANE: He fed the estate information into...
WONG: No.
KISSANE: ...I don't know - a Claude, a ChatGPT and it started emailing me.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure company, and it says that bots reached a historic milestone this year. For the first time, more than half of the traffic on the internet is nonhuman.
WONG: Anxiety about this tipping point has been simmering since at least the 2010s. People in online forums were expressing concern even then that bot-generated content was taking over the internet and that artificial interactions were replacing human ones. These worries coalesced into a name...
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WONG: ...Dead Internet Theory.
MA: So basically, the dead internet - it's just bots talking to other bots?
WONG: Yeah. So it's, like, not only are social media posts generated by bots, but then all of the accounts commenting and engaging with that post are also bots. Avani Wildani is a computer scientist and the former head of AI research at Cloudflare. Avani points out that we use agents more than we might think. Like when we do a Google search, we're sending out bots to get the results for us. And with both humans and bots mingling online, it's not easy to tell which is which.
AVANI WILDANI: It's a constant struggle for, I think, across the industry to understand what bot traffic and human traffic is.
WONG: It's important to distinguish between humans and bots because they use the internet differently. Avani's research has shown that AI web crawlers, for example, look at a broader range of content than humans.
MA: Earlier versions of web crawlers would surface information in search engine results. The person doing that search would then click through to the original source. But today's AI power and web crawlers, well, they synthesize that information to generate summaries.
WONG: Yeah. And this shift in behavior has led to a decline in website traffic for online news publishers, including NPR. And if people aren't going past an AI summary, they're not seeing the ads on a website. Plus, bots don't interact with ads the same way humans do, so any website that relies on ad revenue is losing money. This is upending the basic business model of the internet.
MA: Avani says think about internet infrastructure like a system of roads. Humans are like cars, and bots are like big rigs.
WILDANI: It used to be that the roads were supported by billboards for tourist traps, and now the trucks don't care about tourist traps. And so if it's all trucks, you've got to start charging them for the roads or find some other way to build out those roads, maybe charge tolls for the cars.
MA: We asked Avani if there's a future where there's two different internets - one for bots and one for humans. And she told us she doesn't see that as a sustainable way forward.
WONG: Still, Avani says she's a techno-optimist. She believes we'll come up with a way to have bots and humans coexist online.
MA: Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLES BRADLEY SONG, "THE WORLD (IS GOING UP IN FLAMES)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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