Half of All Articles on the Internet Are Written by AI
AI makes up the majority of content being produced
Three years ago, ChatGPT burst onto the scene.
AI, or more accurately Large Language Models, could turn out passably human text and much faster than any person could do it.
Writers could hear the death knells as their profession looked to be going extinct.
Some businesses did drop their writers. Places reduced their content writing staff, convinced that one or two writers could do the work of ten.
Freelancers saw work diminish as businesses had internal staff crank out blogs, memos, and reports with AI.
However, AI has yet to really take the next step and do any advanced level writing and still is only useful for summaries, quick news stories, and short tasks. Anything longer requires substantial input from a writer.
What has happened is online content creators and bots are now able to write hundreds of simple articles a day and absolutely flood the internet.
It’s often hard to find anything on the web without wading through AI slop to find a decent report or article.
It’s getting worse.
New reports indicate that AI written material now makes up a majority of the content published on the Internet.
A new report in Axios says AI is generating half of the articles being published on the web.
The SEO firm Graphite analyzed 65,000 articles and marked any article in which an AI detector said was more than half written by AI was counted as an AI generated piece.
“We need a representative sample of English-language articles on the web. To do so, we randomly select 65k URLs from CommonCrawl, and confirm that each is in English, has an article schema markup, is at least 100 words, has a publish date between January 2020 and May 2025, and is an article or listicle as classified by the Graphite page type classifier.”
There was some surprising news.
While AI generated articles skyrocketed after ChatGPT’s release, the number has slowed down and looks to have plateaued.
There are few reasons for this.
One, the other use cases for AI written articles haven’t truly materialized like many thought they would.
While it can spit out news bulletins listicles, the writing hasn’t gotten any more sophisticated and it’s great at anything other than letting college and high school students cheat on their homework.
Also, as more people come in contact with AI a backlash has started.
Ideologically, people hate AI because it just steals and regurgitates other people’s work.
Even without the ideological bent, many people simply hate reading AI articles. There is no depth or character to the writing. The information is often wrong or out of date. Plus, once you read enough of it, it’s so easy to spot that many people can avoid it.
An article is Futurism pointed out another reason:
“Citing a second report from Graphite, the Axios coverage notes that it may be because AI content farms are realizing that their shoddy slop isn’t being picked up as much by search engines and chatbot responses, with the firm finding 86 percent of articles in Google Search were written by humans, and only 14 percent AI.”
If these articles aren’t getting traffic, then most of them are pointless. In many cases these articles are used to flood the Internet and gobble up ad revenue but as search engines and platforms find ways to combat AI then there’s little incentive to create them.
Hopefully, this marks a shift away from AI as more and more people choose to stay away from it.
Just how people pay more for handmade furniture or organic food, I hope they will do so for words extracted by means of blood, sweat, and tears from the recesses of the subconscious.
nonononono this makes me want to throw up.
i only use ai to spell and get info about something.
it constantly asks questions. I want to strangle it.