Inquiring minds want to know. How much of the internet content being produced is generated by AI? Or more specifically, how many articles are being published with AI slop? According to a new research report from Five Percent, AI-generated content now exceeds human-written content. However, the authors do note that AI-generated yet human-edited content was not evaluated and may be as prevalent, if not more so. In other words, they only analyzed content directly generated by AI tools like ChatGPT, and not articles that were written by AI but given a human touch afterwards. To find the information, they used an AI detection tool from Surfer and classified an article as “generated” if the algorithm predicted more than 50% of the content was AI-created. The results from 2023, 12 months after ChatGPT’s launch, found that AI-generated articles were nearly 39% of all articles published. But from November 2024, more AI-generated content is now published than human-written.
Sure, the study reveals that most of what you’re reading across the internet today is probably coming from AI, which is unfortunate. But there is some good news. AI-generated material also seems to have plateaued, with its rapid growth slowing around mid-2023. Moreover, we’ve also learned from the study that AI-generated articles “do not perform well in search,” meaning Google is doing a pretty good job of filtering out AI nonsense.
How accurate are the testing results from the study?
First, the authors used OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to generate 6,009 articles, obviously confirmed to be AI-written, and then used the free Surfer tool to analyze the content. It correctly identified 99.4% of them as AI-generated. But these tools can also have false positives, detecting human-written content as AI-generated in some cases. To ensure that’s not what was happening, the authors also used 15,894 articles that went live between 2020 and 2022 before the release of ChatGPT and assumed to be human-written. The tool flagged 4.2% of these articles as AI-written, which suggests there’s a 4.2% false positive rate.
Of course, AI-generated content isn’t exclusive to writing or text. An AI-generated rock band topped 500,000 listeners on Spotify, so there’s AI music and it’s popular. Sometimes, stunning AI-generated art captures the attention of everyone, creatives too. Moreover, AI-generated movies are now a thing with AI actresses, making Hollywood actors pretty upset. It’s funny how they’re not bothered by the technology until it affects their field. But the real point here is that it’s making its way into everything, and it will be interesting to see how much it dominates in those other creative avenues outside of writing. While it has taken over more human-driven content on the web, that plateau could persist, especially if Google continues to filter out AI content in search.
