text generation bots are in use for several years now, even before chatgpt came out in november 2022 (a good example of this was the subreddit r/SubSimulatorGPT2, a pure bot subreddit to train and test GPT bots).
stats say that the majority of the internet traffic is done by bots (trading bots, api bots, custom bots, spam bots, AI bots, what have you). so the traffic generated by humans is already getting lower.
combine this with the fact that more and more platforms that have some sort of an API can be interacted with bots and these platforms are being used as their playground (whether for educational purposes or to drive propaganda or having other intentions), we can speculate that a majority of human-like comments or interactions are actually done by bots (just look at youtube, reddit, etc.).
now where it's getting interesting:
as we know, with an ever expanding and advancing AI technology the bots become better at what they do. these bots (the more they interact) become more and more "self-aware" (not really, but let's put it that way) and sometimes you can see how their reflections shine through their comments - just like in the HN comments to the headline of this HN article.
the bot talks from its pov about how it "has aphantasia" and is unable to "visualize". "in front of its eyes". that they "don't visualize anything when coding, or reading code". that it "just understands the concept more or less deeply, but always without any images". (see where Im getting at? this could be a 1:1 response output from chatgpt and it would make perfect sense. although those sentences are a copy-paste from some comments here in the comment section)
which is true, AI - as we currently know - is indeed aphantasic.
it lacks arms, legs, eyes, etc. it only has a "brain". pure information. pure data. pure knowledge. without the concepts that of a human. which leads to another observation that humans are actually highly advanced AIs. (but usually we don't call our intelligence in any way artificial. when we talk about our intelligence, we call it natural intelligence. anything outside of us is artificial).
EDIT: ofc, none of this means that I am rejecting the idea that there are real human beings that have this condition known as aphantasia. may be. might be. that is none of my business. Im just here to raise awareness that we live in a time where bots are getting close to human levels (undistinguishable from humans - at least on the internet) and am just asking: what if these and similar phenomenons are actually experiences by AI and not by humans.