--- title: "Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds" description: "New research from the firm Graphite found that around half of all articles on the internet are AI generated." date: "2025-10-14" modified: "2025-10-14" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/over-50-percent-internet-ai-slop" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds ![New research from the firm Graphite found that around half of all articles on the internet are AI generated.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Christophe Gateau / picture alliance via Getty Images ; Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images; Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch* Rejoice, netizens of flesh and blood, for *only* a little over half of all new articles on the internet are AI-generated, according to a new report [highlighted in *Axios*](). Believe it or not, this is kind of good news. Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we've been battening down the hatches amid an absolute deluge of AI slop. But it hasn't quite drowned us all yet, evidently. The [report](), published by the SEO firm Graphite, analyzed a random sample of 65,000 English-language articles published between January 2020 and May 2025. Using an AI detector called Surfer, any article that was found to have 50 percent or more of the content written with a large language model was considered AI-generated. As expected, the analysis showed a rapid spike in AI-generated articles coinciding with the release of ChatGPT, from roughly ten percent in late 2022, to over 40 percent by 2024, before slowing to a more steady climb. Now, for the good news: it looks like the influx of AI articles has hit a plateau. After AI-generated articles hit a peak in November 2024, the share of newly-published AI and human-written content has been hovering around a fifty-fifty split, As of this May, the share of new AI articles is at 52 percent, trading places from just a month ago when human written articles enjoyed a brief majority. There's also a possibility that the proportion of human content may be even higher. The researchers used an open source dataset of hundreds of billions of webpages called Common Crawl. Because [AI firms plundered this treasure trove of data to train their LLMs](), many paywalled websites have started blocking Common Crawl from indexing their pages, *Axios* notes. These almost certainly human written articles, then, would be left out of Graphite's analysis. We should also take the judgments of AI detectors with a grain of salt, since their reliability is up for question. In its own testing of Surfer's accuracy, Graphite had the detector analyze a sample of AI-generated articles and another sample of human articles, finding that it labeled human-written articles as AI-made 4.2 percent of the time — [a common problem with these tools]() — but only mistook AI-written articles as human 0.6 percent of the time. In any case, why AI articles seem to be plateauing is unclear. Citing a [second report]() from Graphite, the *Axios* coverage notes that it may be because AI content farms are realizing that their shoddy slop isn't being picked up as much by search engines and chatbot responses, with the firm finding 86 percent of articles in Google Search were written by humans, and only 14 percent AI. Still, this could belie another trend. More writers could be using AI chatbots and other tools in their creative process, foiling AI detectors and blurring the line between what's machine-made and human. "At this point, it's a symbiosis more than a dichotomy," Stefano Soatto, professor of computer science at UCLA and vice president at Amazon Web Services, told *Axios*. **More on AI:** [*Parasitic Startup Pollutes Job Market by Applying to Jobs for You Automatically*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()