The internet is now mostly written by machines, study finds (www.techradar.com)

A new study from Graphite analyzing 65,000 English-language URLs in the Common Crawl archive finds that AI now writes the majority of newly published web articles: AI-generated pieces crossed the 50% mark of new articles in November 2024. Graphite classified articles (2020–2025) as AI-written when over 50% of text matched AI-detection criteria; the team reports estimated false-positive and false-negative rates of ~4.2% and ~0.6% respectively. The surge tracks closely with ChatGPT’s public launch in late 2022—AI authorship jumped from near-zero to roughly 40% within a year—but the growth has largely plateaued since May 2025. The significance is twofold: volume has flipped to machine-first publishing, but visibility hasn’t mirrored that surge—most AI-produced articles fail at SEO, rarely surface in Google results or ChatGPT answers, and are often criticized as bland or repetitive. That explains why publishers may be dialing back fully automated workflows despite low-generation costs and faster model iterations. For the AI/ML community, the study underscores practical tensions between scale and quality, the evolving reliability of detection tools, and likely downstream impacts on search ranking algorithms, content-moderation policies, and commercial content strategies as platforms and audiences increasingly penalize low-quality, machine-authored content.