I’ve read an interesting article that was published by Graphite – a company specializing in SEO (search engine optimization), content strategy, and AI-driven marketing. Their research aim was to find out the percentage of content generated by AI. For that, they analyzed 65,000 English-language URLs from the archives of Common Crawl (a nonprofit organization that crawls the web and collects snapshots of web pages, sort of an archive), covering a 5 year period to May 2025.
Detecting AI generated content
Each article was assessed using an AI content detector, which classifies content as AI generated, if it matches 50% of its detection criteria. Graphite conducted internal testing to determine the false positive (human made content is marked falsely as AI generated) and false negative (AI generated content is falsely marked as human made), which were 4.2% and 0.6% respectively, meaning the tool can quite accurately detect AI content.
Findings
In November 2024, AI generated articles accounted for 50.3% of new web content, surpassing human written articles for the first time. This trend coincided with the release of ChatGPT to the public, in late 2022, which significantly increased the volume of AI generated content. However, since mid 2023, the growth of AI generated content has stabilized, possibly due to declining search performance and the prioritization of human written content by search engines.
Perception vs. reality in AI generated content
Following Graphite findings I started asking myself: is the fact that content is largely generated by AI rather than humans, a good or a bad thing? I’m not sure anyone knows the exact answer, but I’m sure there will be future researches looking into that, as it’s not that simple question to answer as it may seem.
That being said, I did find an interesting study by Zhang & Gosline (2023) which had their results light up how we perceive AI made content. They compared four types of content that reader blindly judged (not knowing who wrote it, AI or human):
- 100% Human made content
- 100% AI (ChatGPT-4)
- Augmented human – human decides (on the main story for ex.), AI assists
- Augmented AI – AI decides, human assists
Findings
Care to guess? content generated by AI only and augmented AI (AI decides, human assists) is perceived as of higher quality than that produced by human experts and augmented human experts.
Second, revealing the source of content production, reduces, but does not reverse, the perceived quality gap between human and AI-generated content. This bias in evaluation is predominantly driven by human favoritism rather than AI aversion: When people know a human created the content, they tend to rate it higher as their perception of quality goes up. When people know AI was involved, it doesn’t make them rate it lower as their perception doesn’t change much.
My personal views
One important remark about the Zhang & Gosline (2023) research – it’s important to acknowledge that although people perceived the AI content as better, doesn’t necessarily mean it really is better. “Perceived as better” does not measure or involves fact accuracy, depth, originality, or long-term impact. It may lack nuances, originality and more, and in worst case scenario, AI can hallucinate as you probably already know. I’m not sure I have a firm opinion on this, but one thing I’m sure of, is that I would like to see a disclosure added for AI generated content and let the reader decide.
Bibliography: Zhang, Yunhao and Gosline, Renee, Human Favoritism, Not AI Aversion: People’s Perceptions (and Bias) Toward Generative AI, Human Experts, and Human-GAI Collaboration in Persuasive Content Generation (May 20, 2023).
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4453958
or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4453958