Creeping AI: One in three new web pages weren't generated by a human
You've probably read something online recently and wondered: was this written by AI? There's a good chance it was. New research from the Pew Research Centre, in the US, examined hundreds of thousands of web pages to measure how often they showed signs of AI generation or editing. Our chart of the week shows that web pages published after ChatGPT was released in November 2022 exhibit significant…
A recent Pew Research Centre study found that more than one-third of new web pages published after the release of ChatGPT in 2022 contain elements generated by AI. This figure, at 35%, is significantly higher than the 9.6% observed for pages created before ChatGPT's launch. Before the AI tool's release, signs of AI involvement were virtually non-existent, with only around 1% of web pages exhibiting such characteristics.
The shift towards AI-generated content has been observed across various online domains, but the impact appears to be greater on commercial websites (9.3%) compared to educational (.org - 4.6%) and government (.edu/.gov - 1%) sites. This disparity suggests that institutions like schools and government agencies are still cautious about incorporating AI-generated content into their official web pages.
The Pew researchers also analyzed linguistic patterns in AI-generated text and found notable changes since 2023. For instance, the use of em dashes has roughly doubled, and the employment of Oxford commas has increased by 63%. Additionally, phrases like "align with", "delve", "interplay", "showcase", and "testament" have more than doubled in usage, suggesting a distinct AI writing style.
Negative parallelism, a writing technique that describes something by contrasting it with what it is not, has nearly tripled in prevalence.
While these linguistic patterns can indicate the likelihood of AI involvement in content creation, AI detection tools are not infallible. They sometimes misclassify human-written content as AI-generated, and vice versa. Furthermore, as AI-generated text becomes more prevalent, there's a concern that it might influence the way humans write, potentially altering the linguistic landscape of the internet.
Written by urgent.news from The National Business's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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