Summary
A report by SEO firm Graphite found that the amount of online articles written by AI briefly surpassed those written by humans but has since become roughly equal. This analysis used AI detection tools and revealed that human-written content tends to perform better in both search engines and chatbot outputs.
Key Facts
- AI-generated articles briefly outnumbered human-written articles online but are now about equal in number.
- Graphite used an AI tool called Surfer to analyze a large sample of web pages to determine their origins as human or AI-generated.
- The report found that articles created by AI began increasing sharply after the introduction of ChatGPT in 2023.
- As of Graphite's analysis, 86% of Google-ranked articles were written by humans, and 82% of articles cited by chatbots like ChatGPT were human-written.
- AI-generated articles tend to rank lower in Google Search compared to human-authored articles.
- Distinguishing between AI and human-written content is challenging because humans often use AI tools to assist with writing.
- Some websites block Common Crawl, a major source of training data for AI, which may affect the perceived volume of human-written content.
- A Pew survey noted that only 20% of users find AI summaries in search extremely or very useful, indicating a preference for human-written content.
