The AI Slop Economy Runs on Unpaid Verification
There is a story going around about artificial intelligence and trust. It goes like this: AI floods the world with cheap, plausible content, so the genuine article becomes scarce, and scarcity means value, so credibility is the new moat. Build trust and win. I believed a version of this but after doing some research, my views have changed. The flood is real, but nobody is paying more for the alternative.
The flood, with actual numbers
Roughly half of new articles published on the web are now primarily AI-generated. That figure comes from Graphite, which sampled 55,400 pages from Common Crawl and averaged three detectors: 49.9 percent in the first quarter of 2026, and roughly flat near half for five straight quarters.
Music is further along. Deezer reportedthat at its peak in June 2026 it was receiving about 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than half of everything...
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