Artificial intelligence may be writing more and more articles, but humans—for now—are maintaining the balance
For the first time, articles generated by artificial intelligence (AI) briefly outnumbered those written by humans, before the two categories returned to equilibrium. This is revealed in new research by the SEO firm Graphite, presented exclusively by Axios.
The Big Picture
The phenomenon is causing concern among experts: if the internet is flooded with AI-generated content, the large language models themselves (such as ChatGPT) risk being “drowned in their own waste” — that is, to produce low-quality material, potentially causing the collapse of the AI ecosystem itself.
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
Europol had already predicted in 2022 that by 2026, 90% of online content would be generated by AI. However, the most recent data show that the situation is much more complex.
What Graphite’s research shows
Graphite analyzed 65,000 web addresses (URLs) published between 2020 and 2025.
Following the release of ChatGPT in 2023, AI-generated content skyrocketed. In November 2024, AI-generated articles temporarily outnumbered those written by humans, but since then the two figures have remained roughly equal.
The company used Surfer, an AI detection system, to examine samples from the Common Crawl database, which includes more than 300 billion web pages. Articles were classified as “AI-generated” when less than 50% of their content was deemed to be human-written.
The Difficulty of Distinguishing
Determining whether a text is human-written or AI-generated remains extremely difficult. According to Graphite’s data, Surfer had an error rate of just 4.2% for false positives and 0.6% for false negatives.
However, as Axios notes, experts acknowledge that this distinction is becoming increasingly blurred, as most content creators now collaborate with artificial intelligence.
“It’s more of a symbiosis than a conflict,” Stefano Soato, a professor of computer science at UCLA and vice president of Amazon Web Services, told Axios.
The Numbers Behind Searches
In a second study, Graphite concluded that search engines still favor articles written by humans.
- 86% of the articles appearing at the top of Google’s search results are written by humans.
- Only 14% come from AI.
- The picture is similar for chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, where 82% of the cited sources are human-generated.
When articles generated by artificial intelligence appear in search results, they usually rank lower, which suggests that algorithms still “reward” the naturalness and linguistic quality of human writing.
The “Common Crawl Paradox”
The Common Crawl dataset, which serves as the primary training source for many large language models, does not cover the entire internet.
In fact, many paywalled media outlets— that is, outlets that offer access only to users who have paid a subscription—where the content is undoubtedly human-generated—now prohibit Common Crawl from accessing their pages. This means that the percentage of human-generated content may be even higher than what Graphite records.
What the trend shows
Graphite’s CEO, Ethan Smith, explained to Axios that clearly labeled AI-generated articles or summaries based on original content perform well in search results.
However, automated summaries generated by search engines do not convince users.
A Pew Research Center survey showed that only 20% of users consider AI summaries “very useful,” and just 6% say they truly trust them.
The Conclusion
Despite the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, readers still prefer the human touch.
The battle between humans and machines is not over—but, as the Axios report shows, for now the balance remains in favor of humans.
Source: in.gr
