Nows and Forevers

There’s one thing you can be sure of with this blog: It’s written by a human being.

These days, you never know. I’ve spent almost as much time avoiding AI on the web, Google and social media as I have being on line. I haven’t figure out how to remove the AI from the top of my Google searches, though.

I say this because I just saw a study from SEO firm Graphite that said from November 2024 to May 2025, there were more AI-generated articles published per month than there were by human writers. Put another way, the number of articles written by human beings on the web went from almost 100 percent in January 2020 to just about 50% in January 2025, with the other half made up by large language models and generative AI.

But even though that has been the case, Graphite said that it thinks the AI writing boom plateaued over the past year:

We hypothesize that this is because practitioners found that AI-generated articles do not perform well in search.

Part of me wonders if they don’t perform well in search because AI is already eatings its own. That AI takes up the space that would have been used for higher-ranked (human-written) articles.

Already I know of publishers who have seen a hit in their traffic from search, because more people are getting their answers from AI. I’d like to know how AI will get its answers as publishers and outlets go out of business because of much lower traffic.