Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All
The assertion that bots are choking off human life online has never seemed more true.
Fil Menczer caught his first whiff of what he calls “social bots” in the early 2010s. He was mapping how information travels on Twitter when he stumbled onto a few clusters of accounts that looked a little suspicious. Some of them shared the same post thousands of times. Others reshared thousands of posts from each account. “These are not human,” he remembers thinking.
So began an extensive career in bot watching. As a distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington, Menczer has studied the way bots proliferate, manipulate human beings and turn them against one another. In 2014 he was part of a team that developed the tool BotOrNot to help people spot fake accounts in the wild. He’s now regarded as one of the internet’s preeminent bot hunters.