How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI Assistants?

November 2022 marked a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence, with OpenAI releasing ChatGPT to the public for the first time. Just over three years later, around half of U.S. adults say they use chatbots powered by AI, including 24% who claim to use them daily. This has raised an essential question about the modern web: How much content online is now written by AI rather than human authors? To explore this query, researchers used the Common Crawl web archive to collect nearly half a million English-language webpages from the past five years – starting a couple of years before ChatGPT’s release. They then ran these pages through an AI detection tool called Open Pangram to see how many were likely written or substantially edited by AI.