Saad Ullah
● Oxford researchers recently declared that "the internet as we knew it is dying." The reason? AI-generated content is rapidly replacing human writing across the web. Data from Graphite.io, visualized by Axios, shows a dramatic shift: AI-written articles jumped from just 5% of all content in 2020 to 48% by May 2025. By mid-2025, we crossed a critical threshold—AI articles hit 52%, officially outnumbering human-created content for the first time.
● The economics are straightforward. Generating an AI article costs less than a penny, while human writers typically charge $10 to $100 per piece. That massive cost gap has pushed publishers and platforms to embrace AI content at scale. But researchers warn this shift comes with serious long-term risks.
● The biggest threat is something called "model collapse"—a feedback loop where AI systems increasingly train on AI-generated text instead of human writing. Think of it like photocopying a photocopy, as Oxford researchers put it. Each generation loses fidelity. Rare ideas disappear, creativity dulls, and everything starts sounding the same. As Ask Perplexity noted: "Today's AI slop becomes tomorrow's training data, producing worse output, which becomes training data again."
● ChatGPT launch in November 2022 was the turning point that accelerated this shift. By mid-2025, the balance had tipped completely, raising urgent questions about not just the future of journalism, but the integrity of the internet itself.
Saad Ullah
