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Study Finds a Third of New Websites Are AI-Generated 58

Posted by BeauHD from the reshaping-the-internet dept.
alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers -- which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive -- published their findings online in a paper titled "The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet." The research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose."The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments," the researchers write in the paper. "We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022."

"I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web quite staggering," Jonas Dolezal, an AI researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. "After decades of humans shaping it, a significant portion of the internet has become defined by AI in just three years. We're witnessing, in my opinion, a major transformation of the digital landscape in a fraction of the time it took to build in the first place."

Maty Bohacek, a student researcher at Stanford and one of the co-authors of the paper, added: "As AI-generated content spreads, the challenge is finding a role for these models that doesn't just result in a sanitized, repetitive web," he said. "Rather than forcing models to be perfectly compliant and agreeable, allowing them to have a more distinct personality or 'friction' might help them act as a creative partner rather than a replacement for human voice."

Study Finds a Third of New Websites Are AI-Generated More | Reply

Study Finds a Third of New Websites Are AI-Generated

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  • Might be to late already! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Monday April 27, 2026 @07:15PM (#66115510)
    The Internet is being buried with AI generated slop being created, indexed, summarized and regurgitated as even more AI slop to be consumed by AI bots to generate even more AI slop. With anything really creative, innovative, informative and true being the needle in the proverbial haystack and effectively hidden.

  • Somebody is writing things as if they expected something different to happen.

    Yeah I am sure there are still people out there that hand code web sites.

    Probably many more that use template-based tools that have been developed over years and they are familiar with them. Many of those.

    For myself, if I started a new web site now I would use AI to do it because it is a better tool than any other. It is just a tool. You can get good or bad results from it like any other tool, depending on how skilled you are. Yes, knowledge and skill still matter. Same as before.

    No news here. Move on.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by fleeped ( 1945926 )

      Did you even read even the summary? I know we're on Slashdot though, so ... fair enough. It's not about hand-coding websites, it's about the *content*. Imagine that somebody wants to share something with the world via the internet. Now, this sharing is at 66% efficiency, with the added bonus that the content will be stolen, rehashed and added to the already crowded competition for user attention. It's a bit grim, imo.

      • Good? cut out the middle man. we can chat with a bot ALL the time and stop surfing the web. why bother to fake websites and fake loaded search results? just have the bot do everything directly! add in some randomized tone/attitude by topic for variety like multiple sources do... conspiracy crazy people and idiot big mouths can be replaced with hallucinations, possibly with a lower occurrence.

        new chat. repeat. foobar.

  • I thought people choosing to hide the truth (Fox News, Moms for Liberty [to restrict others' education]) would cause the idiocracy. It seems the idiocracy will come from corporations using AI to echo sane-washed propaganda to other AIs.
  • Like ublock origin will add something to block the AI generated websites, I ran across a few myself and noticed it too after opening a link only to be presented with clickbait content

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )
      uBlock Origin itself could do it. Just need someone to make a list that we can subscribe to that blocks all of the slop sites.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      If you want to cut off yourself from the web ... a third is quite a bit. And coders are good at adopting new tech and at saving work. Of course they use AI tools where they are useful and it will only get more over time.

  • We had ChatGPT 2 and other ways to generate sloppy websites before 2022.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ebunga ( 95613 )

      Not to mention the affiliate marketing SEO spammers had their own little AI-based respinners going back a little further once the simple string substitution respinners were getting clobbered in google search results.

  • "Rather than forcing models to be perfectly compliant and agreeable, allowing them to have a more distinct personality or 'friction' might help them act as a creative partner rather than a replacement for human voice."

    It would also make AI more difficult for humans to detect. Being able to spot AI is the reason that key parts of the internet is still usable and human trust in it hasn't been broken yet.

  • If you don't feel like writing things, then I'm not going to read them myself. We will plug AI into AI as a big circular human centipede oroboros.

    I guess us humans will have to do things that don't involve mass media consumption.

    R.I.P. late stage capitalism

  • The problem is not that there are a lot of AI slop pages being generated every day. The problem is the search results you get back from google are increasingly dominated by these AI slop pages. It's becoming difficult to avoid them and the misinformation they spew.

    • Go on Google News and start clicking links to stories. A growing fraction of them now read less like articles and more like a list of bullet points. I don't know for sure they're AI generated, but I suspect a lot are. This isn't random webpages. These are commercial sites that a few years ago would have been considered reputable news sources.

      • You're absolutely right. There is a certain style and format that makes them easy to spot. Or, more precisely: they are easy to spot for the small number of people who know what to look for. However, very soon they will become difficult to identify as AI-generated.

      • The bullet point style was rising popularity before the 2022 ChatGPT epoch. It is strongly favored by readers in the under-40 demographic, at least in USA. I suspect it is becoming more common because of that as much as because of AI.

  • GIGO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Monday April 27, 2026 @07:46PM (#66115606)
    So AI will be training itself on stuff generated by itself, the ultimate self licking ice cream cone. Reminds me of the game of putting a paragraph repeatedly through translation software back and forth between to languages until you got gibberish,

  • This is a race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Monday April 27, 2026 @08:03PM (#66115632)
    The damage that it's going to do the Internet, and to society, and to education, government, and all the other components of society, is staggering. An enormous amount of work done by dedicated people over decades will be swamped by the flood of AI slop, and I don't think we'll know what we've lost until it's gone.

    Many readers of this site are likely familiar with various sci-fi stories that deal with nanobots which have begun reproducing without limit, eventually consuming all resources and reducing their planet to "gray goo". This is the information equivalent: it will expand to occupy everything that it possibly can, overwhelming everything generated by humans. And when that happens, it will impact our shared view of reality, which is based on a (mostly) common set of facts.

    And when nothing is real, anything can be real. This will not escape the attention of would-be fascists and dictators.

  • "Less Verbose"? (Score:3)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Monday April 27, 2026 @09:40PM (#66115728)

    I find the repetitive, flowery crap that claims to be a website today to be quite useless. Multiple sites on a subject have carbon copied content (or at least lead-ins). It is the quintessential enshittification of the web.

    Curious what this brings us next...

  • Is this why websites have all gotten so slow? They all need to use at least 100 libraries just to put up a blog page.

    • Not all.

      I edit my business's webpage with vim. It's plain html and has only two graphics (stored in the same directory).

      And I get people complimenting me on its design, which I find amazing.

  • it's dead, jim (Score:3)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Monday April 27, 2026 @10:34PM (#66115760)
    The www. The open web is finished. The www is for logged in services only now. The things you have to do, booking air tickets, banking, taxes.
  • More than half of my search results are AI generated trash. Half the time I just go to the AI answer and then its sources, because they're more likely to be on target. The web is quite fucked, and its only getting worse.

  • Hosting a web site costs money, using an AI to do something costs money. What is the reward for spending this money ? I have a feeling that most of it is not what one would call good. Reasons that come to mind:

    • * Spreading a political/similar message or confusing someone else's message
    • * Generate clickbait to earn money from Google/...
    • * Persuade people to buy something which might be real or a scam

    There must be more that I cannot think of now. What do you think ?

  • But how good is their search ranking? If search engines are appropriately down ranking these sites, then no big deal.

  • A friend of me wanted to show a video of something so he tried to find it using a search engine. All we could find were "funny" AI slop adaptations of it that were very bad and unfunny. It wasn't even possible to find the original video! This is how AI is affecting the internet right ff'ing now.

  • I find it hard to believe that the web is becoming "less verbose" with the use of AI content. In my experience, it is very hard to get the AI to provide to-the-point answers. It goes on an on.

    Now as for cheery, this might in fact be the case - after all, the AI is trained on human output, which, on the web, is about 99% marketing material (kidding, but you get the idea) - probably leaving out the haters...

    Also, it seems most commenters here fail to realize this is about content, not about the technical impl

  • The last round of phishing emails mostly redirected off a known good site like www.google.com/url?q=https#3A#2F%2F ... Reactivate your password scam https://ontarioopenschool.ca/h... [ontarioopenschool.ca] And many others. Every email was a unique website and the website looked halfway legit.
  • You got AI web slop on your hands. Learn to recognize this and move on.

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