Reading an article online? It’s now a coin flip whether it was authored by a human or AI
Not this one, though.
Ahh yes, it’s another great day to be someone who writes words for an online audience. I’m sure I won’t come across any news on the internet likely to send me into an existential spiral about my career choices…
According to new figures from AI-powered SEO company Graphite, cited by Axios on Tuesday, artificial intelligence is now behind more online articles than humans, as the internet groans under the weight of bot-generated content more broadly. Yes, while OpenAI’s latest text-to-video generation model, Sora 2, has at once been captivating and horrifying audiences in recent weeks, AI has been starting to dominate the world of online writing for months now.
Rather than just totting up the amount of em dashes in the piece or checking if Margaux Blanchard cropped up in the byline, Graphite used AI detection software across a sample of 65,000 English-language online articles and listicles to gather the data. The company determined that examples mostly or wholly written by AI were outweighing human-authored versions as early as November 2024, almost exactly two years on from the launch of ChatGPT.
Our analysis of the same dataset suggests that the two have been roughly equal ever since, though it’s hard to imagine that staying the case for too long. That’s especially true when you consider that, contrary to what you might expect, researchers at MIT have found that “content generated by generative AI and augmented AI is perceived as of higher quality than that produced by human experts,” according to humans in blind test conditions.
