Do you want to surf an AI generated web that feels just a bit fake?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

As of mid-20205, about a third of newly published websites were AI generated.

That's a massive increase from just three years before, when the number hovered around zero.

The AI written text provides fewer diverse viewpoints, and is generally presented in a cheerful manner.

That's all according to an early study outlast month. One of the authors is Stanford researcher

Maddie Boeachek. I asked him how AI is changing the nature of the internet.

It seems like these AIs might have a tendency to provide similar responses or to really fixate on certain topics.

And so to that extent, it might be that people will be seeing less diverse texts overall.

And also that these texts might be more positive, might be more artificially cheerful.

A lot of folks are reporting this tendency to be sycophantic, which means that these AIs have a tendency

to be very positive and very encouraging of the users.

So that might be something folks will be seeing more and more of as they

browse a web. How is this different from how people perceive that artificial intelligence is

changing the web? This is really interesting because we tested these hypotheses against a representative

pool of Americans, or American adults, I should say.

And we put forward six hypotheses in addition to this diversity of ideas or topics and the

sentiments, this truthfulness.

We also tested impact to truthfulness.

So this idea that AI might be making the internet less accurate factually.

Also, the idea that AI might be providing fewer references or citations and links.

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