Author materials are being replaced at an alarming rate by texts generated using machine learning tools.
The research group Five Percent published an analytical report that examined online content published from January 2020 to May 2025. The results show that the Internet as we know it is slowly dying, and human-created texts are fading into oblivion. They are being replaced at an alarming rate by texts generated using machine learning tools. For the first time, these texts surpassed human-generated ones around the end of last year.
Although the number of articles created by AI sharply increased after the launch of ChatGPT, we do not observe a continuation of this trend. On the contrary, the share of AI-generated materials has remained relatively stable over the past 12 months. We hypothesize that this is due to AI-generated articles performing poorly in search rankings, which is confirmed by a separate study.
Thus, one theory is that Google is indeed doing a good job of filtering out AI garbage. Alternatively, AI may have learned to perfectly imitate humans.
Regarding the accuracy of the study itself. It was based on a single algorithm—a free tool called Surfer. This is not the most reliable method. However, Five Percent tested this algorithm on 15,000 articles published between 2020 and 2022 (presumably written by humans) and found a 4.2% false positive rate.
To assess the share of missed AI texts, the authors generated 6,009 articles using GPT-4o, ran them through Surfer, and found that 99.4% of them were correctly identified as AI-generated.
Five Percent detailed their methodology, including how exactly GPT-4o generated the test texts. But it is clear that this does not cover the full range of actual queries used by authors, so the accuracy of the study still raises questions.
In other words, it may not be that the growth of AI content has stopped, but rather that algorithms have become more difficult to recognize it.
However, it is quite possible that Google has indeed learned to suppress at least some of the AI garbage, and this alone is prompting publishers to return to "expensive but reliable" authors of flesh and blood.
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