AI slop floods the web: ~50% of press releases now AI-written, yet AI music gets only 1-3% of streams

Exponential View (Azeem Azhar) · rss · 2026-09-28

Azeem Azhar's data column examines the scale, economics, and governance of AI-generated content:

Scale: Every third new webpage now has some AI involvement; press releases hit a nearly 50% chance of containing AI text in June, doubling within a year. Over half of new tracks submitted to Deezer at peak were fully AI-generated, yet they account for just 1-3% of streams.
Monetization — Pocket FM: The Indian audio-drama app runs 93% of content through AI, scaling from 100,000 to 2.5 million hours per year. Revenue only turned after feeding listener data back into production: 96 of 770,000+ titles each earned over $1 million, doubling revenue in a year.
Distribution squeeze: Large sites lost 22% of Google referral traffic since AI Overviews launched. DistroKid (40% of new music distribution) is being sued by UMG for allegedly passing off mass-generated AI tracks as legitimate. Deezer found up to 85% of AI-track streams were fraudulent and turned its AI detection tech into a licensing business.
Verification economy: At least $240M has gone into AI rule-shaping funds, but auditing and certification remain underfunded; the open question is who bears the cost of verification.

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