AI Is Causing a Crisis of Agency
Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as “the Inversion.” Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone’s grasp on the very reality of online experience. “What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t ‘truth,’ but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be,” Read wrote. Today, “the Inversion” feels almost quaint. Autonomous AI agents roam the internet, answering emails, sending texts, and occasionally deleting the code repositories of entire companies. An endless library of chatbot-speak crowds out human-written words in every Google search. Bots are spinning up music and videos, conjuring bad poetry and prose, building websites, doing research, making transactions, writing plodding memos to your boss, solving geometry conjectures. Those AI outputs then ride the rails of an internet …
