AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
The proportion of articles published online that are primarily AI-generated has reached 50%, matching the number written by humans. This trend has stabilized since Q1 2025, after significant growth following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Despite the increase in AI-generated content, it appears that these articles do not perform as well in search engines compared to human-written articles.
- ▪The percentage of primarily AI-generated articles jumped from 36% to 50% within two years of ChatGPT's launch.
- ▪As of Q1 2026, primarily AI-generated articles accounted for 49.9% of published content.
- ▪AI-generated articles are suspected to receive less traffic than human-written articles despite their prevalence.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Graphite |
| Canonical URL | https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-online-articles-as-humans-do |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 16:42:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T16:55:02.306Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T16:55:02.306Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | CRI6aGGMu7bX |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Key TakeawaysThe number of articles published on the internet that are primarily AI-generated (50%) is equal to the number written by humans (50%).ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within the first 12 months, the percentage of primarily AI-generated articles jumped to 36%, and reached 48% by 24 months.However, since Q1 2025 the percentage of primarily AI-generated articles has plateaued at roughly 50%. We previously published this finding with data up to May 2025, and new data confirms this trend.We build on our prior research by using three different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). We independently evaluate each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Graphite.
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