New Zealand was the training ground for the 2024 US election

Imagine if most of the internet was just noise.

Much of the internet is bots.

There are more bots every day. Every site that's in any way bot-trainable has bots scraping posts and chats.

We have AI. It can auto-recognise voices. It can mine text for information which it can categorise and file, but cannot process it or use to further its own ideas. It can compile and compartmentalise and label everything ever written, everything being spoken, all words in the world if we let it. But it can't think.

Neither can the bots on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. They can write arguments. They can repeat arguments flawlessly. They can argue with themselves and you wouldn't know it. They are as advanced as ChatGPT.

It's 2010. Much of the internet is bots.

Reddit is a cesspit. I don't use Reddit, except to find useful information. Many users are bots. There are more bots joining every day.

We have AI. It can auto-recognise voices. It can create AI-generated photos that are indistinguishable from humans most of the time. A human trained to detect AI-generated faces who had spent ten+ hours learning this skill could identify an AI-generated photo 90% of the time. But no one does this, and most of the tiny profile pictures are of dead people anyway.

On Reddit, there are people piloting bots to generate targeted discourse. The bots analyse arguments and reply as if they were users. The good answers attract upvotes and downvotes and bots iterate accordingly. A New Zealand journalist notices they are being used for election interference and writes a book on it. We say 'That's terrible!'.

We do not read the book.

We interact with bots every day. We ignore most of them. We are used to these low-quality accounts by now. Because of how many there are, the bots often interact with themselves. It is like a cluster theory of bots, like colliding molecules in the air.

It's 2015. Much of the internet is bots. There are more bots every day.

Reddit is a cesspit. I have a Reddit account for hobbies and history and tv shows and local content. I make posts there, and they get karma. There is a lot of noise. Posting comments in the big subs get you more karma. I spend hours writing answers to ethical social dilemmas in Am I The Asshole?. I get better at ethical social dilemmas. I get better at writing answers.

So do the bots.

It's 2022. Much of the internet is bots. Except for Gen Z, we use the internet how we've been using it since 2010. We play stupid games that take more of your money and time. We use the same social media sites. We post memes and vent and chat. We comment. We talk the same politics. We have the same politics. We are the same as we were a decade ago.

So are the social media sites.

We have AI. It can auto-recognise voices. It can mine text for information, which it can categorise and file but cannot process or use to further its own ideas. It can compile and compartmentalise and label everything ever written, everything being spoken, all words in the world if we let it.

It can't think. But it doesn't need to.

We are 'using' AI via ChatGPT, feeding instructions and questions to it. ChatGPT is frequently wrong about easy-to-google answers, even though its conversation is perfect. We laugh at it.

We are worried that students will use chat GPT to write university essays. It is able to do this easily and mostly unidentifiably with a mere modicum of human editing. Some students still do not manage to evade human detection, but many do. Even when the humans are looking for it.

Reddit is a cesspit. I help start a NZ politics sub. Reddit has bots so good it is impossible to distinguish between bots and humans, even when looking closely at profiles and trends. I am banned from Reddit.

It's 2024. Much of the internet is bots.