Warnings about artificial intelligence have been coming thick and fast lately.
The so-called godfathers of AI have been vocal about the existential risks the technology poses. At the same time, tech leaders and researchers continue to debate whether we're building something that will save us or ultimately undo us.
While many praise AI for its potential to cure all the world's diseases and outsmart Nobel Prize winners, fears are growing about job losses, environmental costs, and the very real possibility that the tech could pose a threat to human survival.
That said, AI critics felt a 'win' for humanity the other day when OpenAI pulled the plug on its major Sora project.
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The reality likely sits somewhere in between the good and the bad. But a new post from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has added a fresh insight to the conversation.
Taking to his platform X, the tech mogul shared a graph posted by Brett Winton, Chief Futurist at ARK Invest, alongside the caption: "AI content will vastly exceed all human content".
The graph tracks the volume of written content produced by humans from 1500 all the way through to 2025, which seems a slow, steady climb across five centuries of history.
However, right at the very end, in 2025, a purple line showing AI-produced content shoots almost vertically upward, surpassing the entire accumulated output of human writing in what appears to be a matter of months.
In a follow-up post, Winton elaborated on what that milestone actually means.
"By the late 2020s, AI cumulative written output--every postcard, memo, whitepaper, and business-document--should be surpassed by AI. We left a written record; that record will be synthetically surpassed," he shared.
If AI has already overtaken us in the written world, the question of which fields fall next feels less like speculation and more like a countdown.
Microsoft and its co-founder Bill Gates have both previously warned that only a small number of jobs will remain safe from AI's advance, and with development continuing to push toward artificial superintelligence (ASI), the pace of that evolution shows no signs of slowing.
However, in the comments to Musk's repost, plenty of people were quick to defend the irreplaceable qualities of human writing.
One user wrote: "More content doesn’t mean better content. Humans still bring context, emotion, ideas and originality."
Another user added: "I think this makes real human writes more valuable than ever. In a world full of AI, human writing is the one that will be valued the most."