The Entire Internet Is Being Polluted by AI Slop

AI slop has made its way into practically every corner of the internet. Just look at Facebook, or what's become of Pinterest. But what about AI-written text? It may not be as flagrantly bonkers as AI images, but it's also started to permeate the web. In a new study that's yet to be peer-reviewed, a team of researchers from Stanford University say they've managed to estimate how much writing floating around the web is the work of an AI model — and all it took was analyzing over 300 million documents, including press releases, consumer complaints, and job postings. "We wanted to quantify how many people are using these tools," study coauthor Yaohui Zhang, a Stanford researcher, told Fast Company. Zhang's team found that after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the proportion of text that was generated or modified by LLMs in all those categories skyrocketed. With corporate press releases, for example, the number jumped from around 2 to 3 percent to around 24 percent by late 2023. ... Read full article.