Bots engaging bots: Is this the internet's mid-life crisis?

Growing online interactions that involve no human being should make us ponder the web's future

- RITA MCGRATH & M. MUNEER

Till recently, the digital frontier looked boundless, a perfect virtual world where human interaction and the exchange of ideas were encouraged and democratized. With the rise of AI tools, the internet is witnessing several disconcerting trends. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) study reveals that over 57% of sentences on the web have been translated into two or more languages with machine learning. Users in Africa and South Asia encounter content that has been poorly translated or distorted into a misleading click-bait. The motive? Advertising dollars.

The underlying problem is a combination of tech limits and global inequalities. In low-resource regions, where there is insufficient linguistic data available to train AI models, translations tend to be wildly inaccurate. As a result, reality is distorted for profit, with users left without recourse to redressal.