The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
Estimating the volume of AI-generated text online is challenging due to the lack of a central index and biases in web crawls. Researchers used the Internet Archive and a stratified sampling method to analyze web content from 2022 to 2025. They tested four AI detection tools and found Pangram v3 to be the most reliable across various conditions.
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How much new text on the internet is AI-generated? Answering this question is harder than it might seem. Constructing a statistically representative sample of the internet is difficult, as there is no central index, popular domains are vastly over-represented in most crawls, and archival coverage has shifted considerably over time. To work around this, we draw on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and apply a multi-dimensional stratified sampling approach, approximating a uniform random draw from publicly accessible web pages published between 2022 and 2025 (see Section 3.1 in our paper). On top of this sample, we need a reliable way to tell AI-generated and AI-assisted text apart from human-written text.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.
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