Whether we like it or not, AI is now a huge part of our world. Websites like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are where a lot of people are going to get advice, information, and even recipes. There’s a ton of rightful uproar about its place in creative spaces, from crafting film and TV scripts to using the likeness of deceased actors in new projects. So it is not shocking that a recent study found that one third of relatively new websites are AI-generated. We learned about this rather bleak news via 404 Media, and it really makes us question what is powering some of our favorite websites.
To be clear, your team at Nerdist are all very much so human. So no worries there! Now, more about this study. Researchers from Stanford University and the Imperial College London teamed up with the Internet Archive and found that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. That is the same year that ChatGPT launched, which is certainly not a coincidence. They published their findings in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet,” and said that these websites are making the internet less verbose. And that really means less creativity and meaningful content and conversation.
“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.”
It took so many years for the Internet to become a driving force that connected humanity in unprecedented ways. Now, in just a few years, that landscape is totally different. There’s very real consequences of heavy AI usage to our environment as well as our workplaces as people in some industries are losing their livelihood to AI tools. But, like death and taxes, it seems that AI is simply unavoidable, especially if one third of newer websites are created by it.