Half of the articles on the internet are written by AI, but Google and ChatGPT prefer texts written by humans

Artificial intelligence (AI) has caught up with humans in the number of materials published online — their share on the internet is now roughly equal. This is stated in a study by Graphite.

According to the study, in November 2024, the number of articles created by artificial intelligence first exceeded the number of texts written by humans. Since then, the ratio has leveled off and remains at the same level (although this is strange, as it is unlikely that humans have been writing more texts independently since then, and the reason may be that the criteria from these researchers simply stopped working with the release of improvements in new versions of AI - editor's note).

The growth of content generated by artificial intelligence began in 2023 — shortly after the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot by OpenAI (November 2023), which became one of many chatbots released later.

At the same time, search engines still prefer texts created by humans. In Google results, 86% of articles are written by authors, while only 14% are by AI. A similar trend is observed with chatbots: 82% of the materials cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity belong to humans, while 18% are from artificial intelligence.

Here’s what people are saying about this on social media:

• "If only these articles were reliable. Right now, even people with a decent education can distinguish where AI provided truthful information and where it delivered its fantasies. But when a new generation grows up with knowledge based on AI hallucinations, that will be scary. Recently, a study came out in Germany where AI refers to articles written by AI itself as reliable sources (!). Such an interesting recursion, an article by AI based on articles by AI, referencing articles by AI. The priest had a dog..."

• "It will end with people getting completely confused in this chaos, and a global 'reset' of the Internet will have to be made, cleaning all content. With a simultaneous rejection of AI 'services', which will be used by the poorly educated masses who see no difference..."

• "Read the local news more carefully... 'Japanese from Ferrari', 'titanium distribution panels', 'V8 transmission', 'five-speed manual transmission with dual clutch', wild pictures, erroneous technical data, obviously unreliable prices, and many similar exercises almost every day... A living person would have been removed long ago. So AI is clearly being used."

• "AI is not responsible for its information flow. It often writes complete nonsense... And, unlike humans, there is no one to ask."

• "Ministers are already being replaced (allegedly) by AI. The government and president can be replaced too. There will be no one to ask, and the puppeteers in this brave new world will not be shown to you."