Just over half (52%) of all articles appearing online each month are now written by artificial intelligence (AI), according to a study by the American SEO agency Graphite, first reported by the news site Axios.
Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the share of AI articles has exploded.
Now that AI language models are gaining traction with the general public, researchers fear that these same models could eventually suffocate and implode because their training data is also generated by AI.
A 2022 Europol report estimates that by 2026, some 90% of all online content will be generated by AI. It does not seem to be happening that fast for now, although the pace at which AI content is overtaking human writing is impressive.
Analysts at Graphite concluded that the share of the 65,000 examined webpages that were written by AI has risen sharply since the launch of ChatGPT.
Content farms
In November 2024, the share of new monthly articles written by AI briefly exceeded that of human authors. Meanwhile, the share appears to be stagnating at around 50%.
Graphite uses the open-source database Common Crawl, which maps almost the entire internet. Based on this, the researchers analysed a large sample. An article is considered AI-generated if 50% or less of the text is written by a human. Graphite used the AI detection system Surfer for this, which the company claims is reliable and produces only 4% false positives (classifying human texts as AI).
Remarkably, search engines like Google reportedly still prefer human texts. According to Graphite, 86% of Google search results refer to human texts.
For the time being, it does not seem to be so much about news articles, but mainly about informative blogs, often from so-called "content farms," which aim for as many visitors as possible.
