Bots Now Outnumber Humans on the Internet. Here's What That Actually Means (CNET, 6/15/26)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/bots-now-outnumber-humans-on-the-internet-heres-what-that-actually-means/

The internet was built on the assumption that there's a human being on the other side of every screen. That assumption no longer holds. Cloudflare's Radar tool now shows agentic AI bots generating 57.4% of web requests globally, with humans accounting for just 42.6%, a milestone that arrived well ahead of even the most aggressive projections. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had predicted bots would surpass humans by 2027. It happened this month.

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The agentic bots Prince is referring to are the systems that search the internet on your behalf when you ask an AI chatbot a question and return the results. Those searches and visits generate real web traffic, even if it doesn't look that way from your AI chat window. The data means that more AI agents are visiting these webpages than real humans. Humans still physically engage with content more than AI does, but AI visits webpages more often.

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The idea behind Dead Internet Theory is that bots and AI generate most of the internet's activity. The theory seemed far-fetched to many when it emerged in the late 2010s, but it's becoming harder to argue against as data like Cloudflare's becomes public.

The implications become more concerning with additional context: Forty percent of Facebook posts are estimated to be generated by bots. Music-streaming service Deezer announced in April that 44% of new music uploaded to its platform is now AI-generated. And a report from Axios posits that AI generates 52% of all online articles (though not this one -- honest).

It's important for people to hold the line against AI as much as possible.

We need human dialogue in a message forum.

Facebook and YouTube have become flooded with AI slop because it was tolerated, even encouraged.

If you have to play with AI because you think it somehow makes you creative or more intelligent (even though the actual work's done by AI trained on the world's intellectual property stolen by AI robber barons), please at least keep it off forums intended for human communication. There are forums elsewhere for AI addicts to show off stuff they had AI generate for them.

I've mentioned before that seeing a lot of AI slop on DU will turn off liberals who are very opposed to the AI bros and the harm generative AI does. I've posted responses that AI slop gets from liberals on Bluesky to try to make that point clearer.

No one can look like a credible opponent of generative AI, data centers and the AI bros if they're promoting or, worse, generating AI slop. That AI slop is part of the reason AI bros want those data centers. The ability to use AI to pretend you can do something you really can't do is bait to create addicts.

[msongs]

1. on FB i hardly ever see a post from an actual "friend", just spam based on previous views

how many 3 minutes clips do I really need of golden girls and lucy lol