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Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules govern what they can access and how they behave. The web, after all, is designed primarily for people, even if we occasionally have to solve puzzles and captchas to prove we are not bots.

这篇报道最初发表在我们的 AI 每周通讯《算法》(The Algorithm) 上。若想第一时间在收件箱中获取此类报道，请点击此处订阅。直到最近，互联网用户还可以简单地分为两类：机器人和人类。长期以来，网站一直允许机器人执行自动化任务（例如抓取网页内容），但这些机器人必须遵守有关访问权限和行为方式的规则。毕竟，互联网主要是为人类设计的，尽管我们偶尔需要通过解谜和验证码来证明自己不是机器人。

But this is being entirely upended by the release of personal AI agents, which can do things for you online, like booking flights or hotel rooms. They have recently been unleashed at scale by the launch of apps like OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse. Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled from August to September. The mingling of these agents with human visitors—on an internet designed largely to prioritize people—has gone poorly, with many websites blocking AI agents that consumers have sent to negotiate prices or plan vacations.

然而，随着个人 AI 智能体的发布，这种情况正被彻底颠覆。这些智能体可以在线为你处理事务，例如预订机票或酒店房间。随着 OpenAI 的 Dots 和 Meta 的 Muse 等应用的推出，这些智能体最近已被大规模投入使用。Muse 在发布首月下载量就达到了 500 万次，而智能体网络流量从 8 月到 9 月增长了两倍。在主要为人类设计的互联网上，这些智能体与人类访客的混杂导致了糟糕的结果，许多网站开始封锁消费者派去协商价格或规划假期的 AI 智能体。

Still, if the demand for agents keeps going up, the internet will be increasingly redesigned for them instead of us. Such changes are coming because agents really do mark a third category of web visitor. They’re not humans, of course, and they use the internet at machine speed. But they’re not quite bots, either, because they’re acting on behalf of individual people to do tasks that can be perfectly legitimate and useful. They just work faster than a person would.

尽管如此，如果对智能体的需求持续增长，互联网将越来越多地为它们而非我们进行重新设计。这种变化之所以会出现，是因为智能体确实代表了第三类网络访客。它们当然不是人类，并且以机器的速度使用互联网。但它们也不完全是机器人，因为它们是代表个人执行任务，而这些任务可能是完全合法且有用的。它们只是比人类工作得更快。

Since agents don’t fit into the systems we have for differentiating bots from people, some platforms (especially the more security-conscious ones) have opted to just ban them entirely. TechCrunch recently reported people having trouble deploying their agents to websites ranging from Pizza Hut to Yelp, which doesn’t allow AI to book restaurant reservations. Amazon has blocked Muse’s agents and is waging a court battle against the AI startup Perplexity to block its agents too.

由于智能体不符合我们现有的区分机器人与人类的系统，一些平台（尤其是那些更注重安全的平台）选择直接全面封禁它们。据 TechCrunch 最近报道，用户在将智能体部署到从必胜客 (Pizza Hut) 到 Yelp 等网站时遇到了困难，Yelp 甚至不允许 AI 预订餐厅。亚马逊已经封锁了 Muse 的智能体，并正在与 AI 初创公司 Perplexity 进行法律诉讼，试图封锁其智能体。

Though a judge recently ruled in favor of Perplexity, Amazon has filed an appeal in which it argues that AI agents threaten its advertising business by making it harder to distinguish between ads seen by humans and those served to bots. These blocks are annoying for early adopters, but Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, predicts it will soon affect the whole web. Once it becomes common knowledge that AI agents can be sent to request refunds or negotiate prices, for example, agents will overwhelm customer service departments to the point where they become unusable by real people.

尽管法官最近做出了有利于 Perplexity 的裁决，但亚马逊已提起上诉，辩称 AI 智能体威胁到了其广告业务，因为这使得区分人类看到的广告和发送给机器人的广告变得更加困难。这些封锁措施对早期采用者来说很烦人，但宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院副教授 Ethan Mollick 预测，这很快会影响整个网络。例如，一旦“可以派遣 AI 智能体去申请退款或协商价格”成为常识，智能体将淹没客户服务部门，导致这些部门对真实人类而言变得无法使用。

“Humans will eventually get very annoyed when their agents aren’t allowed to do this on their behalf,” he recently wrote on LinkedIn. If demand for personal agents grows, platforms will find ways to let them in. That’s especially true because the vast majority of agentic web traffic is to e-commerce sites, meaning that platforms have money to be made if they allow the legions of new AI agents to shop on behalf of real people. Indeed, the e-commerce giant Shopify is already welcoming the agents by giving them their own checkout lanes that bypass pages designed for humans.

“当人类发现他们的智能体不被允许代表他们处理这些事务时，最终会感到非常恼火，”他最近在 LinkedIn 上写道。如果对个人智能体的需求增长，平台会找到让它们进入的方法。这一点尤为真实，因为绝大多数智能体网络流量都流向了电子商务网站，这意味着如果平台允许大量新的 AI 智能体代表真实人类购物，它们就能赚到钱。事实上，电商巨头 Shopify 已经在欢迎这些智能体，并为它们提供了绕过人类设计页面的专属结账通道。

The pressing question is what will happen to the internet for the rest of us in the process. We’ve grown used to a web where, even as it’s increasingly designed to exploit our attention, humans have at least remained the intended users. But that internet might yield to one optimized instead for the agents that will eventually outnumber us, making it even more miserable for the humans who are left.

紧迫的问题是，在这个过程中，我们其余人的互联网会变成什么样。我们已经习惯了这样一个网络：尽管它越来越多地被设计用来榨取我们的注意力，但人类至少仍然是预期的用户。然而，那个互联网可能会让位于一个专门为最终数量将超过我们的智能体而优化的网络，这会让剩下的人类处境更加悲惨。

How might this go? Perhaps websites become increasingly neglected as destinations for real people. Humans who want to browse and compare products themselves encounter worse interfaces. Verification systems are imperfect; imagine constantly being asked to verify that you’re a human, not an agent (and hey, maybe you’ll need to get your iris scanned to do so). That sweater you want doesn’t have one price listed for everyone but instead displays different prices to different people’s agents. You can never tell when your agent’s recommendation is influenced by advertisements or platform commissions.

这会如何发展？也许网站作为真实人类目的地的地位会日益被忽视。想要亲自浏览和比较产品的人类会遇到更糟糕的界面。验证系统并不完美；想象一下，你不断被要求验证你是人类而不是智能体（嘿，也许你甚至需要扫描虹膜才能通过）。你想要的毛衣不再为所有人列出一个价格，而是向不同人的智能体显示不同的价格。你永远无法判断你的智能体推荐是否受到了广告或平台佣金的影响。

That’s a far cry from the future promised by Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, in which AI agents will give consumers greater power and bargaining leverage. But that promise is not outlandish. Agents are capable of genuinely helping people by fighting bogus medical bills or researching more affordable car insurance, for example. Whether they can actually be used for these purposes depends on what rules are set for how agents interact with websites and what exactly they’re allowed to do.

这与谷歌、Anthropic 和 OpenAI 所承诺的未来相去甚远，在那个未来中，AI 智能体将赋予消费者更大的权力和议价能力。但这一承诺并非天方夜谭。智能体确实有能力通过对抗虚假的医疗账单或研究更实惠的汽车保险来真正帮助人们。它们是否能真正用于这些目的，取决于为智能体与网站交互设定的规则，以及它们被允许具体做什么。

These rules are still being written. Some of them will benefit all of us—neither consumers nor businesses want credit card information to be waved around by agents wherever they roam the web, for example, and rules to keep agents more secure are a good thing. It’s the more contested ones, like whether businesses can block agents from their websites or prevent them from negotiating better deals for consumers, that will determine whether the web becomes a highway for agents working for us or against us.

这些规则仍在制定中。其中一些规则将造福我们所有人——例如，消费者和企业都不希望信用卡信息被智能体在网络上随意传播，因此制定让智能体更安全的规则是一件好事。而那些更具争议的问题，例如企业是否可以禁止智能体访问其网站，或阻止它们为消费者协商更优惠的交易，将决定互联网最终是成为为我们服务的智能体高速公路，还是成为与我们作对的障碍。