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There’s a strange contradiction happening online right now: the internet is becoming increasingly synthetic, yet the demand for “authenticity” keeps growing. Generative AI has already transformed how content gets produced online. Images, articles, ads, videos and entire campaigns can now be generated in seconds, but the next shift is even bigger: agentic AI. Systems capable not only of generating content, but of acting autonomously on behalf of users — researching, comparing, filtering, recommending and making decisions. In other words, the internet is slowly becoming a space navigated not only by humans, but also by machines acting on their behalf. At the same time, platforms are becoming overwhelmed by synthetic media. Europol estimates that in 2026, up to 90% of online content could be synthetically generated or heavily AI-assisted. Yet while automation accelerates, another word keeps appearing everywhere: authenticity. Brands want creators to feel relatable. Platforms reward “trusted voices,” and audiences increasingly search for recommendations from “real people’, but the burden of producing this authenticity rarely falls equally. Historically, women have been expected to humanise systems: to soften environments, maintain relationships, demonstrate emotional intelligence, and make institutions feel emotionally legible. Now the internet is demanding the same thing again. As feeds fill with AI-generated noise, human presence becomes economically valuable again — but only a very specific kind: approachable, emotionally articulate, warm, trustworthy, and permanently available. The internet increasingly rewards forms of labour that women have historically been expected to perform for free, and maybe this is the hidden story underneath the AI boom. Not simply automation replacing humans, but automation is increasing the value of emotional labour while making working conditions more precarious. In Code Dependent, Madhumita Murgia pushes back against the fantasy of AI as something frictionless or autonomous. Behind the mythology of seamless intelligence are workers labelling datasets, moderators absorbing traumatic material, gig workers managed by opaque systems and communities reshaped by algorithms they cannot see or challenge. Murgia describes this as a form of data colonialism: the value created by AI is not shared equally, and many of the people doing the work remain disconnected from the final product or the wealth it generates. The more “intelligent” these systems appear, the easier it becomes to forget the human labour behind them. Code Dependent argues that the AI economy is built on hidden human labour. At the same time, much of the invisible, precarious and emotionally demanding work sustaining these systems is disproportionately carried out by women.
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