It seems that there really are no people left on the
internet. We have new evidence of this from an unexpected
source. Experts from the technology company Graphite (https://shorten.ly/YXaN7r) analyzed a random sample of
65,000 English-language articles published from January
2020 to May 2025. The analysis revealed a sharp increase
in AI-generated articles following the advent of AI: from
about 10% at the end of 2022 to over 40% by 2024, with
the growth rate slightly slowing afterward. It appears that
today, the flow of AI content has reached a plateau. After
a peak in November 2024, the share of new AI articles and
human-written materials has stabilized at around 50-50. As
of May 2025, AI-generated articles account for 52% of new
content, having overtaken human-written texts, which
previously held a slight advantage in the preceding month.
I have also long noticed a strange paradox - our gopher://
server is visited by lot bots. Despite using an exotic
protocol, more than half of the server visitors are not
humans. If they are not humans, then who or what are they?
Of course, they are AI. What does this mean for us humans
in practical terms? Firstly, I have previously published
information about the "dead internet." Now, thanks to new
data, I believe I can see the overall picture more clearly.
Based on data from ITU and Statista for 2023-2024,
including adjustments for minimal access-such as Smart
TVs in underdeveloped regions-the claim is that approximately
5.3 billion people are connected to the global network.
Secondly, this statistic is often accepted uncritically.
However, it accounts for any form of access, even minimal.
Does someone in a village have a smart device connected
via Wi-Fi? Congratulations - they are counted as internet
users! But at the same time, the ITU also considers content
creators. As of 2023, they are said to was number was
2.6 billion. That is, people who are not just connected but
actively producing content. According to Statista, in 2024,
about 4.9 billion people accessed the internet at least once
a month. These are users who have gone online at least once
a month, technically. So, the number of people online in the
traditional sense is much lower, but the exact figure
remains unclear. If we trust Statista and other sources (Pew
Research, Graphite), only about 500 million to 1 billion
users actively create content on blogs, video platforms, and
so on. Thus, zombie AI websites, zombie AI accounts, zombie
AI chatbots, and zombie AI commenters add another 50%
noise to these figures. From the maximum estimate of 2.6
billion active users, about 1.3 billion could be the product
of AI activity. Therefore, out of an alleged 8 billion people
on the planet (though this is not certain), 5 billion have
access to the internet, but only 4.9 billion do so at least
once a month. The number of living humans who creating
content is no more than 1 to 1.3 billion. From this, two
contradictory conclusions can be drawn. Either the remaining
people simply watch others' content - which I do not believe
- or, as I am convinced, there are actually no humans on the
internet. In a sense, the internet is, in reality,
relatively dead.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72)