A third of new webpages written with AI

It is trivial to generate bodies of text on infinite topics, so of course the web is filled with the stuff. Pew Research tried to estimate how much.

To explore this question, we used the Common Crawl web archive to collect almost half a million English-language webpages from the past five years – starting a couple of years before the release of ChatGPT. We then ran the text of those pages through an AI detection tool called Open Pangram to see how many of them were likely written or substantially edited by AI.

In a random sample, 9% of English language webpages were marked as having signs AI authorship. When looking at only pages that went live after the release of ChatGPT, they found a much a higher rate of 1 in 3.

Caveats considered, such as the accuracy and false positives with Open Pangram, the upward trends are clear. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I do not like that the em dash and Oxford comma are now a mark of AI usage.