Pretty much daily, economist and blogger Tyler Cowen posts a collection of “Assorted Links” for the day on the Marginal Revolution blog. I felt like these posts were getting a bit longer recently. So I crunched the numbers and it seems to be true, at least on average: daily assorted links posts average +15% more links — that’s one link! — ever since ChatGPT came out, steadily increasing after staying flat for a decade (but for COVID).
Just eyeballing it you can see the upward trend. But it shows up in the annual average as well: going from low 6’s for years (but for 2020, when to be fair there were a lot of noteworthy links) to 6.5 in 2023, 7.0 in 2024, and 7.3 in 2025.
Zooming in to a series that is just 2021 onwards lets you see the upward trend more clearly. It’s slight but it’s there!
There are of course a lot of links posts per year:
My guess is the true number is even closer to 365 for most years; my script might have missed a couple from the naming or miscounted the links in a few.
I don’t know if this is really because of AI. Maybe Cowen has more time to blog these days? But my guess is that his taste is pretty much the same as 10 years ago. So either Cowen is 15% more productive, or there’s 15% more newsworthy things. Probably a bit of both. Has AI made me 15% more productive?..