AI's share of new web pages on the Internet is growing rapidly, research reveals

Experts and ordinary users have long been concerned that more automated systems and bots are now creating and consuming content on the Internet than humans. This idea is called the Dead Internet Theory, and now a new study has further strengthened this concern.

The Pew Research Center examined nearly half a million English-language web pages collected over the past five years. The researchers used a tool called Open Program to examine the text of these pages to determine how many texts were written or edited with the help of artificial intelligence.

According to the results, only 10 percent of the pages in the overall sample showed significant signs of AI. But when only pages published after the launch of ChatGPT were looked at separately, the rate suddenly reached 35 percent. That is, more than a third of newly created web pages were found to have clear involvement of artificial intelligence. The revelation came at a time when the activity of AI-generated content and AI bots on the web is rapidly increasing. Experts say that if this trend continues, it will become very difficult to distinguish between human and synthetic materials in the future.