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Exclusive: The web is still mostly written by humans, study finds
A new report indicates that AI-generated articles online have stabilized in quantity, now roughly equaling human-written content after a brief period of AI dominance. This development is significant as researchers have worried about AI content overwhelming human work and negatively impacting large language models. While a 2022 Europol estimate projected 90% of online content to be AI-generated by 2026, Graphite's analysis of URLs from 2020-2025 shows a sharp rise after ChatGPT's launch. Graphite used an AI detector called Surfer on a sample of Common Crawl data, classifying articles based on the percentage of human-written content. The study found Surfer to have low error rates in distinguishing between human and AI-generated text. Furthermore, search engine data reveals a strong preference for human-written content. 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were human-written, and similar patterns were observed in chatbot citations. However, definitively counting AI-generated content is difficult due to the increasing collaboration between humans and AI. Some paywalled human-written content is also being excluded from large data sources like Common Crawl, potentially skewing the numbers. Ultimately, current trends suggest users still prefer and trust content primarily written by humans over AI-generated summaries.