I’m not into conspiracy theories, but this one is worth the read. As an Intellectual Property lawyer, I’m always keeping an eye on the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and how that impacts the world of law.
Enter “The Dead-Internet Theory”. It’s the widely interesting and complicated idea that a large portion of the Internet is controlled by robots.
We obviously know sites like Amazon, Google, Etsy, provide proof of human interaction, but when you really think about it, we only frequent a handful of pages that suit our interests. We’re not looking for something weird. In fact, we turn away from merchants that don’t have normal payment methods, because we try to stay safe on the Web. We certainly don’t go around looking for fraud, but that’s where the dark side of A.I. resides.
The dark side of what? The following might shock you: Research was done in 2018 that proved less than 60% of Internet traffic is actually human, rather, it’s fake Web traffic and websites designed to defraud humans. And that was 2018. One of the places this runs rampant is YouTube; you can actually purchase ‘likes’, ‘comments, ‘views’, etc. This seems harmless, but it taints the system and opens the door for more unsafe Internet practices.
How does this impact you? It’s simple. Your Internet browsing and transactions, business or casual, are either real or fake. This will get increasingly harder to recognize what’s safe as hackers get better at what they do and as A.I. gets – well – more intelligent. Here’s a cheat sheet for Internet Safety, which includes bonus tips for keeping children safe online, also.
Francine D. Ward
Attorney-at-Law, Author, Speaker
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