The Bad Coin

Forty-seven percent of Medium posts are AI-generated — up from 3.4 percent in 2018. The mechanism driving good content off the open web and behind paywalls was first described in 1558. In October 2024, Wired commissioned two independent analyses of Medium — one of the largest open writing platforms on the web. Pangram Labs examined 274,466 recent posts using a transformer-based classifier trained to distinguish AI-generated text from human text. Over forty-seven percent were flagged as likely AI-generated. A second firm, Originality AI, analyzed a separate sample and found roughly forty percent — compared to 3.4 percent in a 2018 baseline. Medium is not an outlier. It is a leading indicator. Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report found that automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time in the report's twelve-year history. Fifty-one percent of all web traffic is now generated by bots — thirty-seven percent classified as malicious, fourteen percent as legitimate crawlers. The prop