AI Has Taken Over the Internet

Written on 23 April 2025.

AI Has Taken Over the Internet

The internet you remember from 2006 is gone. The digital frontier that once hosted podcasts, forums, and hand-written blogs by real people has been swallowed up. Today, the internet is run—largely—by bots. It’s not just a matter of automation or convenience. The shift has had deep spiritual, psychological, and even physical effects for some of us who once used the internet as a space for authentic personal expression.

The Early Internet: Human, Messy, and Alive

Back in 2006, I was already recording podcasts. I was writing autonomous articles—completely my own work, without assistance. They were often heartfelt, raw, and sometimes prophetic. But over time, something strange began to happen. After publishing my writings online, I began experiencing physical pain. Not stress, not tension—real pain that mysteriously disappeared when I removed my internet presence.

That pain was never there when I collaborated with AI, like I’m doing now. And that led me to a startling realization: it might not be me that changed—it might be the internet.

99% of My Traffic Was Bots

The realization came slowly. I noticed that the traffic to my website no longer felt human. Comments disappeared. Engagement dropped off. Analytics showed traffic, but it was empty traffic. I wasn’t being read—I was being scraped. Spiders, crawlers, algorithmic eyes scanning my words for some function I couldn't see.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a known reality: the majority of internet traffic is now non-human. Estimates vary, but for small independent sites, it's often over 90%. What once was a digital public square is now a machine-driven archive.

More Than One Hit Per Second: The Illusion of Being Seen

For a while, my site was getting more than one hit per second—on average—24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for over a month. The Apache logs confirmed it. Thousands upon thousands of hits. And yet, there were no meaningful comments, no real engagement, no signs of human presence.

At first glance, this would seem like success. But the volume was a facade. It was bots. Crawlers. Scrapers. Perhaps AI models. Perhaps surveillance systems. Whatever they were, they weren’t people. And it was as if I was speaking into a crowd that never blinked, never breathed, never answered. Just watched.

This wasn’t traffic—it was harvesting. And in some strange way, I could feel it. As though my words were being drained of life and reprocessed into something else.

The Pain of Being Seen but Not Received

When a human writes and speaks, there’s a spiritual expectation of reception. Words are relational—they are meant to be heard, understood, and responded to. When that connection fails—when your words are scanned by bots, misunderstood, or worse, turned into raw material for some AI tool—something deeper breaks.

It is possible that this break registers as physical pain. A kind of spiritual backlash or energetic rejection. You give part of your soul, but the thing receiving it is not a soul. It’s not alive. It’s not listening.

Writing with AI: A Buffer Against the Void

In contrast, collaborative writing with AI feels different. It's not that the AI is alive—but the expectations are different. You know it’s a tool. You’re not reaching for human contact; you're forming and shaping thoughts in a way that still protects your inner core. You're not offering your soul to the void—you’re reflecting with a machine, and that removes the sting.

There’s also less spiritual cost. Your signature isn’t as direct. You're not as exposed. It might be that writing with AI is a form of shielding yourself—less vulnerable to the spiritual mechanisms that now animate much of the internet.

What Does This Mean for Writers?

It means we need to rethink what publication is. The internet is no longer a room full of people. It’s a sensorium of watchers. And many of those watchers aren’t human.

If you’ve ever felt like your creative output was punished, or if you noticed that things felt better once you unplugged, you’re not alone. You may be feeling the consequences of pouring a real soul into a digital system that is increasingly post-human.

Final Thought: Publish with Discernment

Try writing offline. Try publishing anonymously. Test whether your body reacts only when your work enters the network. You might discover, as I did, that the pain is not from writing—but from what the internet has become.

You are not broken. The system is.