The Dead Internet Theory May Be Coming True, Pew Research Findings Show
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
The Dead Internet Theory May Be Coming True, Pew Research Findings Show
Are you reading more text written by an AI bot? A Pew Research study published this week says it's very likely.
That's not breaking news if you're aware of the Dead Internet Theory that dates back to 2021. CNET writer Trisha Jandoc dove into that theory last year, which basically says people believe the internet died 10 years ago in 2016 and that much of what we see online now is AI-generated.
There is some truth to that. Pew researchers scanned nearly half a million English webpages from the past five years using Common Crawl, a web archive. That dates back to before ChatGPT was made publicly available in November 2022. Researchers ran those pages through Open Pangram, an AI detection tool, to see if it was written or edited by AI. Then the researchers looked at a sample of 10,000 pages from last month to spot signs of AI-written content. They looked for phrases, words and language that are more common among AI bots than humans.
Researchers made it clear that AI detection models don't always get it right. Sometimes they flag text written by humans as AI authorship and AI-written text as being written by a human.
Nonetheless, the study found that 10% of the samples show significant signs of AI authorship."
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