And the real risk isn’t that the internet dies. It’s that it keeps talking — mostly to itself.
Let’s stop talking about how the internet used to be.
The more interesting question is what happens next — because the next decade may quietly mark the end of content generation as a human-centric activity.
Not the end of writing.
Not the end of publishing.
But the end of humans being the primary audience.
The Next 10 Years, by the Numbers
Based on current data and growth curves:
- Today: ~55% of web text is already AI-generated or AI-assisted
- By 2028: ~75% of newly published content will be AI-generated
- Early 2030s: ~90–95%
- Around 2033–2035: ~99% of all web content will be generated by AI
This isn’t a bold claim — it’s a scale problem.
Machines produce content continuously. Humans don’t.
Once generation cost approaches zero, volume becomes inevitable.
The Part We’re Not Talking About
Here’s the uncomfortable reality:
Most of this content will not be read by humans.
It will be:
- generated by AI
- scraped by AI
- summarized by AI
- embedded into other models
- used to train the next generation of AI
Humans will mostly interact with:
- the final abstraction
- the compressed answer
- the model’s interpretation of the web
The source material — the articles, posts, explanations — will be machine-to-machine infrastructure.
This is already happening.
A significant and growing share of web traffic today comes from:
- crawlers
- scrapers
- agent frameworks
- automated research pipelines
Humans are becoming a secondary audience.
The Absurd Feedback Loop
We are building an internet where:
- AI generates content
- AI scrapes that content
- AI trains on the scraped output
- AI produces summaries of summaries
- Humans consume the end result
Nothing here is malicious.
Nothing here is fake.
It’s just self-referential.
The web doesn’t collapse — it inflates.
Information grows, but novelty shrinks.
Confidence increases, while meaning thins out.
This Isn’t a Loud Dystopia
There are no killer robots here.
No sudden apocalypse.
This is a quiet dystopia.
One where:
- content exists without clear intent
- knowledge accumulates without authority
- truth becomes a statistical average
- originality is drowned by scale
The internet still works.
It just feels… empty.
The Question We Should Be Asking
If AI systems are now the primary consumers of content:
- Why are we still writing as if humans are the main readers?
- Why does nothing declare intent, confidence, or purpose?
- Why does expert insight look identical to recycled summaries?
And the biggest one:
If 99% of content is created by AI and consumed by AI —
what role is left for humans?
Creators?
Or editors, curators, and governors of meaning?
The Last 10 Years of Content Generation
The next decade may be the final era where “content creation” as we know it still matters.
After that, what survives won’t be volume or virality — but authority, intent, and trust.
Not because humans disappear.
But because machines scale faster than attention ever could.
And the real risk isn’t that the internet dies.
It’s that it keeps talking — mostly to itself.
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