According to LessWrong, the internet is experiencing a fundamental shift away from human-centered spaces. Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, AI-generated content has exploded from roughly 10 percent to over 50 percent of all new online articles. Bot traffic on platforms like LinkedIn continues climbing, flooding public spaces with spam, scams, and low-quality automated posts. In response, people are quietly abandoning public platforms. They're migrating to private Discord servers, messaging groups, and subscription newsletters—closed spaces where actual humans still interact. The trend began before large language models, but AI has dramatically accelerated it. Some researchers predict AI will eventually generate 90 percent of all online content. That prospect has sparked three proposed solutions: implement paid participation to make automation uneconomical, establish verification systems where users vouch for each other, or adopt zero-knowledge proofs—cryptographic methods that prove your humanity without exposing your identity. The European Union is already exploring this last approach as a privacy-preserving alternative.

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