Half of everything you read online right now was written by a machine. Not edited by AI. Not “assisted” by AI. Written by AI. It’s 53.5% to be exact as at October 2025. Watch it happen.
This isn’t abstract theory. It’s measurable reality, and watching it unfold is genuinely shocking.
I created this racing line chart in PlotSet Plus to show exactly when this happened. I didn’t want a static graph because I wanted people to feel this event happen, which is what you get when you animate a chart.
So this what you see, two exploding lines. Human versus machine. Year by year, until ChatGPT is launched.
Turn the volume up. Watch the blue line (human content) dominate for years. Then November 2022 hits and ChatGPT launches. The red line (AI) goes vertical. Well, almost.
Within three years, the amount of AI content produced is now level with humans.
The methodology (for the curious)
I started with 1.6 million URLs collected from RSS feeds and web crawling. I filtered that to 106,000 potential articles. I then narrowed this to 21,000 high quality pieces, excluding spam and promotional content.
Then I built a custom AI detection system in Python using a hybrid approach:
Temporal baselines reflecting actual AI tool availability over time
Linguistic feature analysis examining sentence structure, vocabulary diversity, and common AI writing patterns
Machine learning models trained on known human and AI content
Articles scoring above 60% AI confidence were classified as AI generated.
My results matched Graphite’s original study almost perfectly across the overlapping period. They analysed 65,000 articles from January 2015 to May 2025. I validated their findings, then extended the timeline through October 2025 with 5,200 additional articles.
The data is transparent. The code is documented. The results are reproducible.
What nobody’s talking about
When I ran my detection code across 24,000 articles, something jumped out immediately:
Mainstream media is swimming in AI content.
The outlets you trust, the publications with editorial standards, and the newsrooms that supposedly employ real journalists, are all using AI at scale. You’re doing it quietly without telling you.
They’re not doing this with every article, but enough that you’ve definitely read machine generated content today and thought a human wrote it.
The economics are brutal
An article that once took eight hours to research, write, and edit now takes 30 minutes. The marginal cost of content has therefore, dropped to nearly zero.
The supply of articles has literally exploded, and quality has became optional. The internet is now drowning in words that say nothing (a lot of the time).
You’re feeling it already, aren’t you? The endless scroll through content that looks fine but feels empty. The articles that answer your question without actually helping. The takes that could have been written by anyone, or anything.
That’s what happens when machines can write faster than humans can think.
Two futures (both arriving simultaneously)
Optimistic version: This forces human writers to level up. When machines handle the boring stuff, humans focus on what we do best: insight, storytelling, original thinking. Writing becomes more art, less commodity. Substack proves this is already happening.
Pessimistic version: Quality collapses entirely. AI slop floods every platform. Genuine voices drown in algorithmic noise. Nobody can tell what’s real anymore. Google becomes unusable. Social media becomes unwatchable.
Which future wins?
Both, probably. A bifurcated internet where premium human content exists alongside infinite machine generated filler. You’ll pay for the good stuff. You’ll wade through AI sludge for everything else.
Why this chart exists
I built this visualisation in PlotSet Plus because I wanted to highlight this pivotal event.
PlotSet Plus lets anyone create these exploding line charts without code, without design skills, without the technical headaches. Upload your data. Pick your style. Export in 4K. Five minutes start to finish.
I’m one of the cofounders of this platform and this is me showing you what’s possible. Try it yourself if you’re curious.
The question nobody can answer
I’m going to leave you with this.
When email arrived, we didn’t actually become better communicators. We just sent more messages to people. And, I think that’s what AI might do with content.
So you have to ask yourself, are we creating more value, or just more noise?
I genuinely don’t know. But I know we’ve crossed a threshold. The 50:50 world isn’t a stopping point. What this chart doesn’t reveal is that there has also been a huge surge in the amount of web content produced, by both humans and AI. Human writers are also writing more, probably because they are being assisted by AI, but also because they feel the pressure to write.
This trend is undeniable, and pretending this isn’t happening won’t change the fact that half the internet is already written by machines.
Your move
The 50:50 world is here. What you do with that information is entirely up to you.
Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep thinking critically about what’s real and what’s generated.
And maybe, just maybe, pay attention to what’s actually being said instead of just consuming words that look like meaning but deliver nothing.
The machines can write now. The question is whether we’ll still recognise good writing when we see it.
Music credit: Shadow of Mortus by Rachel Sandy, Epidemic Sounds
Data methodology available on request. Built with PlotSet Plus. Chart animation © 2025
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