Ai-era Internet: Can Blockchain Prove What’s Real Anymore? 2025

As AI blurs the line between real and synthetic media, strategies for restoring user trust online are still taking shape as we enter 2026.

How often have you come across an image online and wondered, “Real or AI”? Have you ever felt trapped in a reality where AI-created and human-made content blur together? Do we still need to distinguish between them?

Artificial intelligence has unlocked a world of creative possibilities, but it has also brought new challenges, reshaping how we perceive content online. From AI-generated images, music and videos flooding social media to deepfakes and bots scamming users, AI now touches a vast part of the internet.

According to a study by Graphite, the amount of AI-made content surpassed human-created content in late 2024, primarily due to the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Another study suggests that more than 74.2% of pages in its sample contained AI-generated content as of April 2025.

As AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated and nearly indistinguishable from human-made work, humanity faces a pressing question: How much can users truly identify what’s real as we enter 2026?

After a few years of excitement around AI’s “magic,” online users have been increasingly experiencing AI content fatigue, a collective exhaustion in response to the unrelenting pace of AI innovation.

According to a Pew Research Center survey, a median of 34% of adults globally were more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in a spring 2025 survey, while 42% were equally concerned and excited.

“AI content fatigue has been cited in multiple studies as the novelty of AI-generated content is slowly wearing off, and in its current form, often feels predictable and available in abundance,” Adrian Ott, chief AI officer at EY Switzerland, told Cointelegraph.

“In some sense, AI content can be compared to processed food,” he said, drawing parallels between how both these phenomena have evolved.

“When it first became possible, it flooded the market. But over time, people started going back to local, quality food where they know the origin,” Ott said, adding:

Source: CoinTelegraph