AI has pushed the internet’s content machine into a new phase, with production volumes across books, lawsuits, science papers, apps, and music far exceeding what pre-AI moderation systems were designed for, reports The Economist. Amazon’s monthly new e-book releases jumped from roughly 100,000 before ChatGPT-3.5 to ~300,000 by late 2025; US pro se civil lawsuits doubled to 41,000 between 2023 and 2025, with 18% of a 2026 complaint sample flagged as AI-written yet just as successful; and 57% of 2025 arXiv papers contained AI-influenced language, up from 12% in 2023. In music, ~75,000 AI-generated songs now appear daily versus 10,000 previously, and 97% of listeners in one survey could not reliably distinguish them from human-made tracks.

How AI turned the internet’s content machine into a firehose