With the arrival and development of advanced AI, synthetically generated content is on the rise
By day a mild mannered desk jockey working on the next big tech article or update and by night...doing more of the same. Anyway, some say I'm an enigma able to balance three or more jobs at once, but really it's just about clever time management, lots of coffee of course, and making sure the next review or blog lives up to the standards set by other esteemed tech publications.
A few years ago as I browsed the comments of a YouTube video, I began to get a sense of deja vu. Didn’t I just read a similarly worded remonstration to another person’s view? And so it continued, every so often when reading discussions, whether on YouTube, Reddit, Medium or the numerous tech websites I visited, there was a sense in some conversational threads that they were becoming just a bit stale and monotone.
In the old days of the internet, which I class as being before the arrival of social media in the mid-2000s, most of the debates occurred in the forums sections of websites. In fact, since beginning to use the web in the early 1990s, it was a very exciting place with lots to discover. The written word was king and the precious few images to complement an article or blog post, although low resolution by today’s standards, certainly did the job of giving the text more life, making you feel immersed in the subject matter.
Forums were a key central hub when it came to debates. As I had a love for all things arcade and video games related, I found myself spending quite a bit of time browsing both official and fan made sites related to the big players of the 1990s including Sega, Nintendo, SNK, Namco and Capcom. The forums were a lively place with debate both good and bad taking shape. Opinion were aplenty and it was not unusual to make discoveries about games, their secrets, tactics and strategies from these discussions that you would not have come up with by yourself.
The best places to access high speed internet was either at my university or at one of the numerous internet cafes both local and in the west end of London. Regarding the latter, there was a chain of super size cafes called ‘Easy Internet Cafe’. These places were massive, with hundreds of internet connected computer terminals with flatscreen monitors ready for public access which was as simple as buying a ticket from a member of staff, or later a vending machine, and then inputting the unique multi-digit code into the welcome screen of your chosen terminal. It was not unusual to get around 30 minutes of access for a £1 and this was sometimes enough to get that gaming forum fix or invaluable bit of knowledge about the arcade gaming scene, particularly focused on Japan because that’s where all the big releases were being worked on and readied for public testing in Japanese arcades before being released world wide.
Then along came social media and suddenly forums began to take second place for popular debates on gaming and a great many other topics and areas of interest. This was followed by the arrival of the smartphone, spearheaded by the original Apple iPhone in 2007. As time wore on and apps began to bring social media to smartphone users, opinion and debate shifted to pocket size devices. Still, it was all very exciting, now you could browse the internet on your phone wherever your were and keep up to date with Facebook and Twitter posts too! This was of course as long as you had an internet connection or data on your phone.
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Why the history lesson then? Well, we need to put things into perspective here. People were the ones behind all the lively debate in the early days. However, something called ‘bots’ also began to appear more and more, which were basically small programs or ‘scripts’ designed to carry out an automated task that although repetitive for humans could be completed and repeated more quickly by computers. In this case, bots could be used to respond to or create comments. There is a more detailed explanation on Wikipedia and it’s worth mentioning that there are different categories of bots such as ‘social bots’ used by social media platforms to comment on, like, share or follow other users to affect their popularity, or ‘malicious bots’, which are an example of bots used for nefarious and unethical purposes. Additionally, bots as a concept, date back to the1950s with the famous computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing proposing the idea that computer code could be designed that was approved according to his very own Turing test, meaning, code written for a bot that passed the Turing test would thereby demonstrate a certain level of artificial intelligence.
Social media has and is such a massive part of the modern internet with various platforms leading the way for how humans interact with one another. Similarly, forums still remain a focal point for discussions between people on various websites covering a variety of interests and topics. Or, that is at least what we think is going on, right? There is a popular conspiracy theory that has been circulating through the 2010s that proposes that most of the content we read or see on the internet is in fact fake. It was not generated by a human but rather by lots and lots of bots. It’s referred to as ‘The Dead Internet Theory’ and began to circulate around 2016 or 2017, before gathered momentum in 2021 thanks to an online article in ‘The Atlantic’. The piece itself pays homage to a forum discussion earlier that year on how the concept is embedded in conspiracy theories. Although the language in the forum debate is sometimes absurd, profane and questionable, in essence, it puts forward the idea that humans have taken a back seat on the web and the internet is now controlled by bots and artificial intelligence that generate content for human consumption. Furthermore, this is being carried out by a small group of powerful individuals trying to control and manipulate human feelings and thought processes for their own gains, whether they be political and ideological or monetary. Now, although the latter argument about a powerful group of individuals trying to control the world wide web for their own gains might sound just a bit far fetched, the idea of content on the internet being automatically generated is not so implausible.
If all this sound like it belongs in the realms of the bizarre and even fantasy, then, well, no. Think about it carefully by taking a step, or two, back and for more than a moment. In the past year the buzzwords has been ‘artificial intelligence’. The growth of its reach and capabilities is exponential and it features commonly in news stories for how it being used in everything from assisting with medical research to getting an ‘A’ star essay written with little to no effort. We are at the beginning of something new here. Just as it was the case with social media entering the world wide web in the 2000s, artificial intelligence has arrived and is beginning to pickup pace.
The whole fake internet story is intertwined with the beginning of advanced artificial intelligence. At first, during the 1990s, it was very primitive and bots were used in the form of chatbots to conduct rudimentary conversations in games or in online messages for a particular website and its services. A decade later and bots began to take on more functions in the world of social media by interacting with human contributors. Now that generative AI is here, from big players including Microsoft and Google, bots have gone up several levels in complexity and subject coverage and can take on the shape and form of a convincing persona that humans would find hard to tell apart from another human.
It is estimated that more than half the traffic on the internet is now generated by bad bots, yet, how would one know when they are speaking or replying to a bot or a real person? By 2026 it is estimated that up to 90% of web traffic will be ‘synthetically generated’ by artificial intelligence, see page 5 of this report from Europol which discusses this trend and its related concerns. There is no sure way to always discern between human or AI generated comments or images for example. The technology corporations have vowed to work on methods that will let businesses and users detect whether internet generated content is real or fake. In fact, there seems to be a concerted effort by these big firms to combat prominent and immediate problem areas such as cybersecurity and threats posed to it from hackers.
For the average user then it’s still a bit of a gamble. One way to mitigate exposure to fake content might be to stick with tried and tested sources. For example, if it’s news you’re after, then going to an actual well known and established news website would be better than reading about it on a forum or Reddit post. If the big tech firms do begin to push through ideas such as watermarks to identify fake content, this will also go some way to help in the fight against bots taking over with AI produced content.
It’s early days in AI but it’s growing and developing at an astonishing, even alarming, rate as governments and tech firms scramble to find solutions to contain its intense, proliferating and untamed reach. It is likely they will succeed with both regulatory boundaries and technological safeguards but this will take time and there is the concern that when such regulation appears, artificial intelligence and its generated content would have taken on a more advance shape and form that fall outside the remit of legislation. However, it will be left up to us, the users to decide just how much of what we consume seems honest and authentic, who we follow, like or subscribe to.
As for the very involved debate surrounding the relentless advances in generative artificial intelligence, that is as they say for another day. I am working on an article about this soon which delves into the good and bad effect it has and will have on society. It's development is ongoing and exponential and alarm bells have been ringing from both within and outside the tech community about how it needs to be reigned in as it is all happening too fast without enough time to understand what is really going on and where it will be in the next few years let alone months.
