Growing Alarm as Widespread Web Writing May Be Slop, But Who’s Reading Any of It?

Watch out for digital zombies on May 4, 2026 It’s fair to say the World-Wide Web has been under heavy fire nearly since it began. “The Web is Dead!” has become a meme headline, much like “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” or “Trump Posts Something Controversial”. So yes, I do tend to roll my eyes when I hear an alarmist take that the Open Web as we have known it is over. This is true even of the very real problem of sloppification. It’s a major hazard, but I think we need to be careful not to overstate the issue. 404 Media recently reported on researchers finding that it’s likely a third of websites in the era of ChatGPT are now generated by AI: Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers—which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive—published their findings online in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the…