Bots Vs Humans
As I doom-scroll throughout my day, I keep wondering: what happened to the internet?
Around 2022, I already had a feeling that AI video would take over and create a flood of the “AI slop” we know today. But now I’m worried that this artificial content will no longer look like slop. It will get cleaner, sharper, more convincing, and harder to separate from anything human-made.
Before I get too doom and gloom, let me show you some statistics that made me realize the gravity of the current situation.
In a report by HUMAN, a cybersecurity firm, the company analyzed traffic across industries like e-commerce, travel and hospitality, SaaS companies, streaming media, and financial services. HUMAN says it analyzed more than one quadrillion interactions across its customer base, and the results are alarming.
Traffic from AI agents grew 7,851% year over year. In 2025, monthly AI-driven traffic grew 187% from January to December. Their findings also discuss how our information is at higher risk from attacks by carding bots and account takeover bots.
HUMAN also flagged an estimated 402,000 post-compromise login attempts. So yes, bots are running circles around us on the internet.
What does this mean for the future? Has our information highway been hijacked?
Kind of. Let me explain.
There have always been malicious actors online, and our ability to spot scams has always mattered. But now the scale is different. The speed is different. The tools are different. Our eyes have to become sharper because the scams are becoming more polished.
Lately, Facebook and Threads have been filled with this type of behavior. Google has also slowly become a lackluster search engine. Even before the AI boom, copycat websites were already phishing victims into paying everyday bills on fake websites. You could criticize those people and say they should have known better, but the truth is the internet has become harder to trust.
With the rollout of tools like Gemini Omni, online media may become a self-feeding doom cycle, like a snake slowly eating itself.
The machine that Google and other tech giants are feeding is creating an echo chamber that distorts information as it moves through their systems. Google has long been the giant platform of search, but that could change with the direction their business is going. People no longer just say, “Google it.” More and more, they say, “Ask ChatGPT.”
As someone who watched Silicon Valley grow from my hometown of Redwood City, California, I have seen tech impact surrounding communities, then the country, and eventually the world.
So what does this mean for search, technology, and yes, humanity?
I have been pondering this question for the past few months. I have realized that we, as creatives and thinkers, will keep seeking escapes in order to interpret our personalized worlds. These new technologies do not come with instructions, and we are still not fully aware of their effects on human psychology.
Bots may become the main drivers of online traffic, executing digital tasks with the help of their human counterparts. We may no longer be the dominant force on the web, but we will still be essential. Humans will provide fresh water to the information highway.
In this analogy, bots reuse, file, copy, and pollute information. Human traffic becomes the clean source — the fresh stream that trains, challenges, and renews the systems built around us.
This new era of online traffic will be very interesting.
And maybe the future of the internet will not be about whether humans can beat the bots.
Maybe it will be about whether we can still recognize what is human when we see it.