AI-written articles surpass human output online for the 1st time, study finds

AI-generated articles officially outnumbered human-written ones across the web in November 2024, according to new data from Five Percent.

Researchers analyzed 65,000 English-language pages from the Common Crawl web archive to determine when automated writing systems overtook human authorship. Using the Surfer AI detector, they found that 50.8% of new articles published that month were classified as AI-generated, marking the first recorded majority of machine-written content on the internet.

The research team reviewed web content created between January 2020 and May 2025 to track the rapid expansion of AI-generated text. Each article was divided into 500-word segments and labeled as AI-written if more than half of its sections were flagged as machine-produced. Validation testing showed a false positive rate of 4.2% and a false negative rate of 0.6%, providing a high degree of confidence in the results.

The researchers linked the surge in AI-created content to the widespread adoption of large language models that became publicly accessible after 2022, which enabled publishers, marketing firms and individual users to automate large volumes of writing with minimal cost and time.

While AI-generated material has continued to make up the majority of new articles since late 2024, Five Percent found that its overall growth began to slow in early 2025. Many of these machine-produced pages failed to appear in major search engine rankings, limiting their visibility compared with human-written content. The authors also noted that search and recommendation systems increasingly prioritize verified sources and original reporting. Industry leaders have described this turning point as both a disruption and a new form of access. In a CNN interview in July, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called AI “an equalizer that gives new capabilities to people who may not be experts in technology.” He pointed to the rapid rise of tools like ChatGPT, saying, “AI empowers people; it lifts people.”