AI’s Growing Effect on Our Online Experience

Artificial intelligence is everywhere and, if it does its job correctly, it’s often invisible. While not as nefarious as science-fiction might have led us to believe, this lack of visibility can make its effect on our lives subtler than we realise. Acting positively, AI can operate to guide our online experience to ensure our safety, influence our engagement habits, and keep systems running smoothly and without issue. An important tool in humanity’s repertoire, the significance of AI in this area cannot be understated.

Preventing Bugs and Crashes

One of humanity’s major shortcomings that AI can address is our lack of speed in many simplistic tasks. While, theoretically at least, we can manage a lot of what AI can for a given job, we’re so slow that the idea can be a non-starter. Rarely is this idea as crucial as it with working to prevent bugs and glitches in online offerings.

This form of testing often takes place when working on heavy loads or by running a program through enormous ranges of input. What might take a human weeks to cycle through, could take an AI hours, or even minutes. This vastly reduces overhead and allows digital systems the extra level of safety that increased testing provides.

One of the ways this testing is used is for flood protection. Through the use of AI, websites can force high loads to see what effect a strain has on how a system operates. If it fails testing or acts unpredictably in these scenarios, websites can adjust their systems accordingly. This could lead to server upgrades or just a change in how the software guides user traffic.

Another popular use of AI testing can come from more directly interactable online experiences like political compass surveys or even digital betting. Online casinos are a particularly strong example here because both player and host financials lay on the line. When an online casino like Betway runs tests for their live games like hold’em, roulette, or baccarat, they prevent risks to either side. In games, and an industry, that is reliant on the safe transaction of deposits and withdrawals, companies like Betway take great pride in the strength of their security measures.

Finally, AI can also be used on websites to quickly probe common security holes that some websites might foster. As Guru99 explains, these typically come in the form of SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and basic security misconfiguration. Again, these could take a long time for humans to check, whereas an AI could complete the task quickly and without the risk of human error.

Guiding Users to Safer Experiences

AI-led safety isn’t just about testing programs, it can also play a part in guiding users to safer practices and experiences. This is something that many users would have experienced before, through warnings made by your device about certain actions. Webpages can be blocked, files can be locked, and other smaller systems are constantly ticking to hold security threats at bay.

While many of these operations are obvious, what is less so is the teaching effect that these simple messages can have. After being warned about certain websites and files, users tend to internalise what they’ve done wrong. Rather than make the same mistake again, we can avoid what caused the issue without realising it, and block files and sites ourselves with AI as a humble and underappreciated teacher.

Informing Our Viewing Habits

The last major effect that we want to look at is how guidance from AI can help shape our viewing habits. This is another aspect that many users would have already experienced with post-video recommendations on what to watch next. Popular on the like of YouTube and Hulu, the AI behind these systems is more complicated than expected.

Instead of just putting on a similar show, the AI recommendations balance components from a wide range of different factors. These include what viewers with tastes close to your own watched, what shows are popular at certain times or seasons, which are on an upward or downward trend, and much more. For example, if you watched the whole series of Wednesday on Netflix, the AI will see you watched every episode, assume that you enjoyed it, and suggest a similar show like The Umbrella Academy to watch next. Of course, you may be so obsessed with Wednesday that you would rather chat to this ai jenna ortega instead, which is just another example of how AI is influencing our lives.

Taking a step back, it’s curious that one of the most influential types of machines we have is something the average user barely appreciates. AI works in so many different ways to improve our lives, from increasing system stability to teaching us proper online behaviours, guiding us to new experiences, and more. As a technology that evolves alongside the greater hardware and software market, the influence of AI is only going to grow, even if we don’t always notice it.