In 2025, AI Produced More Text Than All of Humanity Has Written Since Gutenberg

The data comes from Brett Winton, Chief Futurist at ARK Invest, published on X on March 26. Two charts: annual production, where the AI line crosses the human line in 2025, and cumulative volume, where the projection is to surpass 500 years of human writing within this decade.

A caveat before drawing quick conclusions. This volume mixes code, chatbot conversations discarded within seconds, synthetic data for training other models, and, yes, reports and documents that someone will actually use to make decisions.

For product people, the issue is not just suspicious content. It is that the cost of producing guesswork with the format of research has dropped to zero, and that changes how much weight you can give any analysis without digging into where it came from.

Anyone who uses benchmarks, user reviews, or market data to make decisions has always known that bad data leads to bad conclusions. Trash in, trash out. The difference now is volume and speed. Before, it was possible to make an exception when checking the source, because we trusted the channel, the publication. Now it is mandatory to dig in and understand the full context before treating the content as valid.

Evaluating sources has always been the central concern in journalism, but not always in product. How many times have we only realized during discovery reviews that the source chosen was the one closest to the designer's confirmation bias? What AI did was make that carelessness far more expensive and much better documented.

Source: Brett Winton (@wintonARK), X, March 26, 2026