It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

OPINION Things you might not know about me. I was the first person to write a popular article about the web. Little did I, or anyone else, know how it would change everything. Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We're just picking up AI's crumbs.

That was not how it was meant to be. Mind you, I was never an internet idealist. I didn't think the internet would set us free and lead us to a technological paradise. I did think, however, we'd do better than we have. The internet quickly became, as the song goes, for porn. That was relatively harmless, though, compared to doxxing, targeted misinformation, and automated botnets and troll farms. But there was still some good, although it was hard to find at times. And it was all driven by people.

Now it's another story. Cloudflare's public Radar "Bot vs Human" tracker is reporting that bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva's Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent.

Separately, according to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, "about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated."

The company went on to report that "LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40 percent of long-form posts [were] flagged as fully AI-generated. However, if we included mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9 percent) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9 percent), with only 53.2 percent of X articles flagging as fully human-authored."

There are that many flesh-and-blood people still posting on LinkedIn and Twitter? Based on what I've been seeing, I'd have guessed there were fewer.

So, with the web increasingly written and consumed by AI, where does that leave us, exactly? Nowhere good.

It's not just online. AI is everywhere. A non-fiction writer friend of mine "wrote" a novel last year using AI as a goof. It was, well, awful. But he put it online to see what would happen. A year and a half later, it's still bringing in a few thousand dollars a month. That's a lot better than many full-time, mid-tier novelists I know are doing.

Of course, AI isn't actually writing anything. It's really a copy-and-paste scam on an industrial scale. OpenAI and the other AI powers claim it's not so. However, a recent court filing by the New York Times and others alleges that Vincent Monaco, who leads privacy engineering at OpenAI, acknowledged in a deposition that "OpenAI had searched training datasets and output data despite the company's initial claims that it couldn't access that data. The outlets also alleged OpenAI deleted logs, a violation of the court's preservation orders."

As it happens, one of the publishers suing OpenAI is Ziff-Davis, which published my web article back in 1993. Since then, it's published thousands of my Linux and open source news stories, how-tos, interviews, and features. So, when someone accuses me of using AI in my Linux stories, my reply is "Where do you think AI got that information and phrasing in the first place? Hello! It was me."

Just go ahead and cut me a check, OpenAI, and all will be forgiven.

That said, another AI problem I'm all too painfully aware of is that you can't trust AI's answers. When AI tells you something about Linux, for example, it's not just quoting me, the Linux Kernel Mailing List, or Linux Weekly News. No, it's also pulling data from Ima Moron, a poster from a deservedly obscure subreddit.

Repeat after me: AI isn't intelligent at all. It's just a copy-and-paste of words that are likely to go together. It may sound right, but it often isn't. Confidence is why so many buy AI garbage as gospel truth. You really can't trust it.

The reason I use Perplexity as my search engine isn't that it's more accurate than other AI LLMs; it's that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It's often crap.

It's only going to get worse. I saw the AI model collapse coming back in 2025. It's here now. When I dive into AI "answers" today, every time and in every question, I find it referring not to primary or reputable secondary sources, but to AI summaries. When you pile garbage on top of garbage you do not get reliable information.

I see this all the time in Google's AI Overviews. That's one of the reasons I almost never use Google anymore.

Unfortunately, everyone else is using Google's made-up answers and not even looking down the page to get a real answer from a true expert, or at least someone with a clue about your question of the day.

I can tell on many subjects when an answer is likely to be accurate. But I don't have a clue about medical treatments. I wouldn't trust an AI answer on a serious health problem at all. Nevertheless, I know millions of people do that every day. That's seriously scary.

Equally worrying is that many of us now turn to AI for companionship. I understand loneliness, but this is no cure; it's, at best, a sticking plaster.

You see, the web really is written by AI for AI. We're losing both accuracy and humanity. This is not the web I'd hoped we would end up with. I fear there's no way we can reverse this trend. We'd rather have easy, fast answers and artificial companionship than the real things. That's profoundly sad.

Pass the cheese. ®