AI Bots Account for Close To Half of All Internet Traffic While Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning
How Will Anyone Identify Human vs Bot? Are Voices of Opposition Rising?
The next great technological advancement is upon us. No one cares if we want it or not; it’s happening. Accountability of a nation, possibly. Only the Lord truly knows. We do know that evil has no bounds and comes in many forms. The insistence on the rise of AI sets the stage for what is ahead.
With the rise of AI mimicking humanity, how will true humans be identified going forward? They will need to identify us somehow, tag us, mark us…. sound familiar? Humanity will do anything to prove we are true humans and not machines. Plus, nearly half of all internet traffic is non-human or bot-driven, and 66.6% (yes 66.6) of that is considered bad bots.
Sounds sci-fi, right? Hollywood has their next film, The Creator, lined up for this September. It follows the same concept we have seen before, AI is created to help humanity but destroys us instead. The film follows Joshua, and the team, who are charged with taking down the Creator. They find the Creator AI is in the form of a human child, so of course, they cannot destroy it.
A Decade of Fighting Bad Bots: Key Learnings from the 2023 Imperva Bad Bot Report
Key findings from the 2023 Imperva Bad Bot Report: ( as listed on their site )
Bad bot traffic levels increase for the fourth consecutive year. 30.2% of the internet traffic in 2022 was bad bots, a 2.5% increase from 27.2% in 2021. Good bot traffic levels increased too, accounting for 17.3% of traffic. And while their name might suggest that they are no cause for concern, these good bots can mean trouble too. They can skew web and marketing analytics, making it extremely difficult for organizations to make informed business decisions.
Bad bot sophistication continues to rise, as advanced bad bots account for more than half of bad bot traffic. In 2022, evasive bad bots accounted for 66.6%, of all bad bot traffic. The proportion of bad bots classified as “simple” has remained relatively in stasis, as they accounted for 33.4% compared to 34.4% in 2021. Put simply, the proportion of evasive bad bots compared to simple bad bots has remained fairly similar, but these evasive bad bots are getting much more sophisticated.
APIs are a prime target for bad bots. In 2022, 17% of all attacks on APIs were bad bots abusing business logic, and 21% were other types of automated threats. Furthermore, 35% of account takeover attacks recorded by Imperva in 2022 specifically targeted APIs.
The number of account takeover attacks grows, fueled by data breaches. Attacks have grown by 155% between 2021 and 2022.
Bots masquerading as Mobile Safari accounted for a fifth of all bad bot traffic.This isn’t by chance; we now know that the imporoved user policy settings offered by this browser are being exploited by bots to mask their behavior, which makes them even harder to detect. The browser’s user privacy settings limit the number of attributes the browser reports to the origin, thus making bots harder to distinguish from human clients.
Bad bots are a cross-industry, cross-functional problem. Travel (24.7%), Retail (21%), and Financial Services (12.7%) experienced the highest volume of bot attacks. Healthcare and Law & Government experienced a considerable jump, Gaming (58.7%) and Telecommunications (47.7%) had the highest proportion of bad bot traffic.
Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning
Using an early version of large language model (LLM), GPT-4, researchers “demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT.”
Earlier this year, Microsoft Researchers released a 155-page research paper arguing that the system was a step toward AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which = a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
The research covered a variety of puzzles, including primes that rhyme, Plato’s dialog, image generation, music, coding, misinformation, manipulation and bias. The researchers were using a more powerful version than what is available to the public.
Read the full report:
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early lexperiments with GPT-4
The significance of this? Microsoft, is the first major tech company to release a paper with these claims.
Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology who is part of the A.I. research group at the University of California, Berkeley, said this of systems like GPT-4: “When we see a complicated system or machine, we anthropomorphize it; everybody does that — people who are working in the field and people who aren’t,” Dr. Gopnik said. “But thinking about this as a constant comparison between A.I. and humans — like some sort of game show competition — is just not the right way to think about it.”
The Shouts from the Wall
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
In March, the Future of Life Institute (FLI), joined by over 25,000 signatures has issued an open letter requesting a pause in training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Apparently, what Microsoft researchers have verified sent ripples through the industry. Things need to pause before the threshold is crossed. If the private sector is unwilling to willfully comply, and quickly, then it’s suggested governments should step in and institute a moratorium. What a cross-roads to be at.
The concern is real, people within the industry are speaking up. Here are a few of the concerns included in the Open Letter:
FLI Open Letter outlines a non-exhaustive list of recommendations:
Mandate robust third-party auditing and certification for specific AI systems
Regulate organizations’ access to computational power
Establish capable AI agencies at national level
Establish liability for AI-caused harm
Introduce measures to prevent and track AI model leaks
Expand technical AI safety research funding
Develop standards for identifying and managing AI-generated content and recommendations
OpenAI’s, Planning for AGI and beyond, states their mission is ‘ to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.’
Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
Shut it all down.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist from the U.S. that leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, says the letter from FIL does not go far enough; it ALL must be shut down. He’s worked on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field; he knows what it’s capable of.
Yudkowsky is clear in his words, we are not prepared for this and if we get it wrong there is no second chance. We will all be dead, yep all of humanity wiped out. Our children, everyone and everything gone.
“If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”
Yudkowsky spells out how easy it would be for the AI to order up a custom-made “form”; images of Westworld flesh suits pop into mind, right from labs. Labs that are actively functioning today - “A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.”
Please read his letter, linked in the subtitle, or here.
We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong. - Yudkowsky
Noticeable Integrations
We’ve recently seen ChatGPT integrated with Boston Dynamics Robodog - Spot opening up direct communications. See the video on the New York Post site.
The rise of general artificial intelligence is here. Is it as dire as the 27,565 signatures for the 6-month pause believe, or is it already too far, and all must be 100% terminated? Looking ahead, are you, is your family, prepared?
Matthew 7:7-8
7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
I write each of these Stacks. Forgive any misspelling, grammar issues but atleast you know it’s not AI! 😊