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Machines Now Write Most of the Internet. The Scary Part Isn’t What You Think.
The famous “90% by 2026” forecast was wrong. What actually happened is stranger, and harder to fix
In 2022, a widely circulated forecast tied to a Europol report predicted that 90% of online content would be synthetically generated by 2026.
It’s 2026. Here’s the real number.
Researchers at Graphite analyzed 43,000 randomly selected URLs from CommonCrawl — English-language articles published between January 2020 and May 2025 — and ran them through detection on 500-word chunks. Their finding: in November 2024, the volume of AI-generated articles passed the volume of human-written ones.
The current split sits around 50.9% machine to 49.1% human. And it has stayed roughly there for over a year.
Not 90%. Not a runaway explosion. A plateau, right at the halfway mark.
So the alarmist forecast missed. But the people who took comfort in that missed something bigger, because the ratio was never the interesting variable.
The Prediction Failed. The Direction Didn’t.
Two facts complicate the tidy 51/49 story.
The categories are dissolving. Graphite classifies an article as AI-generated when most of its text reads as…
