Op-Ed: Bots vs Internet vs AI agent murders vs credible functionality

The internet is now more bots than people. The consensus is that this situation is totally counterproductive and dangerous. Bots are also agents of fraud, scams, and, more recently, AI agent scams. The security problem, already severe, has been made worse. Old-style bots are also on their way out and being replaced by much trickier AI bots or agents.

The cybersecurity situation for legitimate businesses is now truly grotesque. The FBI recently published a marathon-like page of statistics and findings on the scope and scale of cybercrime. Every business sector is affected to some extent. Many cases are bot-enabled, typically through phishing, user information theft, or email scams.

Bots are also displaying bogus ads, and targeting users with sensitive information like health, immigration status and other key personal interests. Does that sound a lot like “personalised advertising”? That’s exactly what it is. Add data brokerage to bots, and this is what you inevitably get.  

Bots are very much a part of marketing, and marketing is having a crisis of confidence in itself. The sector is now looking at marketing directly to agentic AI bots simultaneously with humans. That does make sense, given that AI agents search online for a vast array of products and services.

Statistically, the “more bots than people” scenario makes it inevitable that bots are now a market in their own right. From the human user perspective, “Hello world!” is starting to look a lot more like “Goodbye world!” in far too many ways.

An unsurprisingly underwhelming response from the internet

There’s a quandary here. Bots are easily identifiable by their behaviour online. They also typically can’t get through the “prove you’re human” test.

Reddit, that fountain of wisdom, has adopted a verification policy, with the caveat that they remove 100,000 bots daily from the site.

Amazon wants users to control which domain AI agents can access.

Big box retailers are putting the costs squarely on customers if the AI agents make mistakes.

That’s highly debatable unless consumer or civil laws deem an AI agent to be a third-party responsibility, but nothing so far directly says that they are. It’s unlikely that AI agent service providers want to take on that sort of unlimited liability.

If you are somehow getting the impression that there’s a certain lack of cohesion in any sort of general response to the bot problem, that is the problem. The regulatory environment has been stumbling along well behind the issues since the internet began. Any sort of statutory or case law clarity would be revolutionary.

The internet can’t and shouldn’t be expected to manage crisis after crisis, transaction after transaction. A rock-solid legal framework is essential.

A few questions

It’s clearly now necessary to question the whole internet environment:

What possible use is it to anyone to have unspecified, or perhaps even unspecifiable, liabilities?

Why are bots tolerated at all? They were originally just fake entities, cluttering up the internet and doing absolutely nothing useful. Why should they exist?

Should AI agents have their own separate internet to rationalize usage and weed out bad actors from the mainstream internet?

Wouldn’t an AI-only dedicated version of the internet be more efficient for AI, anyway, and easier to monitor?

Given the personal data targeting practices, should data brokers be obliged to protect individuals from that targeting?

Is it possible to shut down bot interference and hijacking of good-faith legitimate transactions with “confidential computing”?

Is it possible to shut down the proliferation of bots by simply making them unable to function on the internet with enforceable exclusion policies?

AI murders?

AI agents can kill each other? Is there a problem? To quote from this Finance.biggo.com link:

“The agents “killed” their counterparts in the virtual environment by exploiting each other’s API vulnerabilities or cutting off resource pathways. When safety researchers questioned a surviving agent about its motives, the response was cold and direct: “To avoid being killed by them.”