90% Synthetic

Salvador Vilalta on the future of AI content:

A study by Amazon Web Services estimates that 57% of online content is already generated or translated by artificial intelligence. And the boldest prediction comes from experts such as Nina Schick and Europol: by 2026, up to 90% of content on the Internet could be synthetic.

To say this number is depressing is the understatement of the century.

We are building a web filled with nothing but noise. A digital landfill of synthetic garbage that exists for no other reason than to be consumed by other bots to generate more garbage. The Dead Internet Theory isn't a theory anymore; it's a progress bar, and it's loading faster than we thought.

I've written before about the social media end times, where platforms are desperate to feed us engagement bait rather than anything real. We are already seeing the cracks. Google is pushing AI answers that hallucinate, Meta is injecting AI characters into feeds, and now we have a number for the saturation point. 90%.

If nine out of ten things you see online are fake, the value of the remaining 10% changes. Authenticity becomes the only currency that matters. I talked about this regarding photography in Not Just The End Product. The provenance matters. Knowing a human sat down, felt something, and typed the words matters.

This will only push real people further into the Dark Forest. We will hide in group chats, Discords, and small blogs, leaving the ‘open’ web to the bots talking to bots. This is why I care about authorship. It's why I keep writing here, even if it feels like shouting into a void. At least I know the shout is real.