the internet is already cooked

remember when people were saying "90% of the internet will be AI-generated by 2026" like it was some distant dystopian warning? that was 2022. we're here now. and yeah, roughly half of all new articles published online are AI-generated. we made it lads.

the funny thing is nobody's freaking out. it just... happened. gradually, then all at once, and then everyone shrugged and kept scrolling.

it's not a future problem

this is the thing that gets me. all the discourse around AI slop was framed like something we needed to prevent. "what if the internet gets flooded with AI content?" bro it's flooded. a study last year found that AI and human-written articles are now basically 50/50 on the web. for a brief moment in november 2024, AI content actually tipped ahead. we crossed the line and most people didn't even notice.

and the people who did notice mostly just posted about it and moved on.

the weird part is search still kind of works

here's where it gets less doomer and more just... strange. despite half the web being slop, 86% of articles that actually rank on google are still written by humans. AI content farms churned out mountains of garbage and google quietly deprioritized most of it. so the surface web you interact with daily is still mostly human-written, but underneath that? it's a swamp.

idk if that makes me feel better or worse. like yeah the stuff you find is fine, but the thing you're searching through to find it is mostly noise now. and that noise is what future AI models are going to train on. have fun with that.

nobody's fixing it

the part that actually gets to me isn't the slop itself. it's that there's no real response. platforms aren't labeling AI content consistently. google's playing whack-a-mole. and the people building these slop farms don't care because even if 86% of ranked content is human, 14% of billions of search results is still a lot of clicks.

we kind of just collectively decided this was fine. or we didn't decide anything and it just became fine by default.

the internet got cooked and we all just kept using it. which, fair enough i guess. what else are you gonna do.