I Am A Person: The Bank Says So - by David G.W. Birch

When you go to a website and are asked to distinguish between a moped and a motorcycle or some stairs and ladder in order to prove that you are an actual person (rather pointlessly, as it happens, since robots are already better at doing these puzzles than people are) don’t you wonder if there might be a better way? I mean, couldn’t someone just tell the social media site, the internet dating app or the online review service that you are actually a person?

Pretty soon people will be in a minority online, if they are not already. Nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots last year and for the fifth consecutive year, the proportion of web traffic associated with “bad bots” grew ( it is now a third of all traffic) while traffic from real human people continued to fall. We’ve been fighting hard with spam filters and firewalls and what not, but AI means that our defences are about to be overwhelmed and pretty soon the majority of internet traffic will be bots talking to other bots. Without some significant changes in the infrastructure, the web will be unusable and fade from human attention.

(The Canadian author Cory Doctorow has a nice turn of phrase around this. He notes that since “botshit” can be produced at an astonishing scale — Amazon has had to cap the number of self-published "books" an author can submit to a mere three books per day — we are facing a crisis of ”coprophagic AI”.)

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