More than half of new articles on the internet are being written by AI – is human writing headed for extinction?

Francesco Agnellini, Binghamton University, State University of New York The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence. As a scholar who explores how AI is built, how people are using it in their everyday lives, and how it’s affecting culture, I’ve thought a lot about what this technology can do and where it falls short. If you’re more likely to read something written by AI than by a human on the internet, is it only a matter of time before human writing becomes obsolete? Or is this simply another technological development that humans will adapt to?

It isn’t all or nothing

Thinking about these questions reminded me of Umberto Eco’s essay “Apocalyptic and Integrated,” which was originally written in the early 1960s. Parts of it were later included in an anthology titled “Apocalypse Postponed,” which I first read as a college student in Italy. In it, Eco draws a contrast between two attitudes toward mass media. There are the “apocalyptics” who fear cultural degradation and moral collapse. Then there are the “integrated” who champion new media technologies as a democratizing force for culture.

Back then, Eco was writing about the proliferation of TV and radio. Today, you’ll often see similar reactions to AI. Yet Eco argued that both positions were too extreme. It isn’t helpful, he wrote, to see new media as either a dire threat or a miracle. Instead, he urged readers to look at how people and communities use these new tools, what risks and opportunities they create, and how they shape – and sometimes reinforce – power structures. While I was teaching a course on deepfakes during the 2024 election, Eco’s lesson also came back to me. Those were days when some scholars and media outlets were regularly warning of an imminent “deepfake apocalypse.” Would deepfakes be used to mimic major political figures and push targeted disinformation? What if, on the eve of an election, generative AI was used to mimic the voice of a candidate on a robocall telling voters to stay home? Those fears weren’t groundless: Research shows that people aren’t especially good at identifying deepfakes. At the same time, they consistently overestimate their ability to do so. In the end, though, the apocalypse was postponed. Post-election analyses found that deepfakes did seem to intensify some ongoing political trends, such as the erosion of trust and polarization, but there’s no evidence that they affected the final outcome of the election.

Listicles, news updates and how-to guides

Of course, the fears that AI raises for supporters of democracy are not the same as those it creates for writers and artists. For them, the core concerns are about authorship: How can one person compete with a system trained on millions of voices that can produce text at hyper-speed? And if this becomes the norm, what will it do to creative work, both as an occupation and as a source of meaning? It’s important to clarify what’s meant by “online content,” the phrase used in the Graphite study, which analyzed over 65,000 randomly selected articles of at least 100 words on the web. These can include anything from peer-reviewed research to promotional copy for miracle supplements. A closer reading of the Graphite study shows that the AI-generated articles consist largely of general-interest writing: news updates, how-to guides, lifestyle posts, reviews and product explainers. https://stmdailynews.com/wp-admin/post-new.php#visibility The primary economic purpose of this content is to persuade or inform, not to express originality or creativity. Put differently, AI appears to be most useful when the writing in question is low-stakes and formulaic: the weekend-in-Rome listicle, the standard cover letter, the text produced to market a business. A whole industry of writers – mostly freelance, including many translators – has relied on precisely this kind of work, producing blog posts, how-to material, search engine optimization text and social media copy. The rapid adoption of large language models has already displaced many of the gigs that once sustained them.

Collaborating with AI

The dramatic loss of this work points toward another issue raised by the Graphite study: the question of authenticity, not only in identifying who or what produced a text, but also in understanding the value that humans attach to creative activity. How can you distinguish a human-written article from a machine-generated one? And does that ability even matter? Over time, that distinction is likely to grow less significant, particularly as more writing emerges from interactions between humans and AI. A writer might draft a few lines, let an AI expand them and then reshape that output into the final text. This article is no exception. As a non-native English speaker, I often rely on AI to refine my language before sending drafts to an editor. At times the system attempts to reshape what I mean. But once its stylistic tendencies become familiar, it becomes possible to avoid them and maintain a personal tone. Also, artificial intelligence is not entirely artificial, since it is trained on human-made material. It’s worth noting that even before AI, human writing has never been entirely human, either. Every technology, from parchment and stylus paper to the typewriter and now AI, has shaped how people write and how readers make sense of it. Another important point: AI models are increasingly trained on datasets that include not only human writing but also AI-generated and human–AI co-produced text. This has raised concerns about their ability to continue improving over time. Some commentators have already described a sense of disillusionment following the release of newer large models, with companies struggling to deliver on their promises.

Human voices may matter even more

But what happens when people become overly reliant on AI in their writing? Some studies show that writers may feel more creative when they use artificial intelligence for brainstorming, yet the range of ideas often becomes narrower. This uniformity affects style as well: These systems tend to pull users toward similar patterns of wording, which reduces the differences that usually mark an individual voice. Researchers also note a shift toward Western – and especially English-speaking – norms in the writing of people from other cultures, raising concerns about a new form of AI colonialism. In this context, texts that display originality, voice and stylistic intention are likely to become even more meaningful within the media landscape, and they may play a crucial role in training the next generations of models. If you set aside the more apocalyptic scenarios and assume that AI will continue to advance – perhaps at a slower pace than in the recent past – it’s quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable. Put another way: The work of writers, journalists and intellectuals will not become superfluous simply because much of the web is no longer written by humans. Francesco Agnellini, Lecturer in Digital and Data Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Bible says little about Jesus’ childhood – but that didn’t stop medieval Christians from enjoying tales of him as holy ‘rascal’

Mary Dzon, University of Tennessee Manger scenes displayed around Christmastime usually feature an ox and an ass beside the infant Jesus. According to the Gospel of Luke, Mary placed her child in a manger – an animal feeding bin – “because there was no room for them in the inn.” No mere babysitters, the ox and ass harken back to the Book of Isaiah 1:3, a verse early Christians interpreted as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. In some early artwork, these beasts of burden kneel to show their reverence – recognizing this swaddled babe, who entered the world in humble circumstances, as lordly. The canonical Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life included in the Bible’s New Testament, make no mention of those animals welcoming the newborn. Yet the motif was already seen in art from the fourth century. It was further popularized by the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, an apocryphal text – that is, one not included in the canon of Scripture. Pseudo-Matthew was composed by an anonymous monk, probably in the seventh century, and includes many tales about Jesus growing up. After its account of Jesus’ birth, the Bible is almost entirely silent on his childhood. Yet legends about Jesus’ early years circulated widely in the Middle Ages – the focus of my 2017 book. While the detail of the ox and ass is quite familiar to many Christians today, few are aware of the other striking tales transmitted by the apocrypha.

Wonder-worker

The Bible does include one famous scene from Jesus’ youth: the incident when 12-year-old Jesus stayed behind at the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, unbeknownst to his parents. Searching for him with great anxiety, they find him conversing with religious teachers, both asking questions and astounding them with his answers. Fourteenth-century painter Simone Martini’s “Christ Discovered in the Temple” portrays him standing before his parents with crossed arms – a stubborn youth, apparently unapologetic about making them worry for days. The apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew – especially versions that incorporate material from an even earlier apocryphal gospel, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas – focuses on the years of Jesus’ childhood. Like the temple story, they show the boy Jesus as sometimes difficult and having preternatural wisdom that amazes and even offends his would-be teachers. More dramatically, the apocryphal legends depict Jesus exercising divine power from a very young age.

Like the adult Jesus of the New Testament, this apocryphal Christ child often works wonders to help others in need. According to the biblical Gospel of Matthew, Mary and Joseph take the infant Jesus to Egypt after an angel warns in a dream that Herod, King of Judea, would kill the child. In Pseudo-Matthew’s elaboration of this episode, we see Jesus, not yet 2 years old, bravely stand on his feet before dragons emanating from a cave, where his family has stopped to rest. The terrifying dragons worship him and then depart, while Jesus boldly assures those around him that he is the “perfect man” and can “tame every kind of wild beast.” He later commands a palm tree to bend down so that a weary Mary can partake of its fruits, and he miraculously shortens their journey in the desert. At times, the Jesus of these legends is largely to blame for the troubles around him. The 14th-century Tring Tiles, now in the British Museum, depict one of Jesus’ friends imprisoned by his father in a tower. Christ pulls him out of a tiny hole, like a gallant medieval knight rescuing a maiden in distress. The father had tried to insulate his son from Jesus’ influence – understandable, considering that many legends show Jesus causing the death of his playmates or other boys who somehow irked him. In a story summarized by one scholar as “death for a bump,” a boy runs into Jesus. He curses the child, who instantly drops down dead – though Jesus brings him back to life after a brief reprimand from Joseph.

In another tale, included in an Anglo-Norman narrative that survives in an illustrated manuscript, Jesus takes off his coat, places it upon a sunbeam and sits upon it. When the other children see this, they “thought they would do the same …. But they were too eager, and they all fell down at once. One and another jumped up quickly onto the sunbeam, but it turned out badly for them, since each one broke his neck.” Jesus heals the boys at his parents’ prompting. Joseph admits to his neighbors that Jesus “was indeed too wild” and sends him away. The 7-year-old Jesus becomes apprenticed to a dyer, who gives him very precise directions about dyeing three pieces of cloth in three different vats. Once his master has left, Jesus ignores his instructions, throwing all the cloth into one vat – yet still achieves the desired outcome. When the master returns, he at first thinks he has been “ruined by this little rascal,” but then realizes that a wonder has occurred.

Bond with animals

These apocryphal legends also show the boy Jesus having power over the animal world. When he enters a dreaded lion’s cave, cubs “ran about around his feet, fawning and playing with him,” while “the older lions … stood at a distance and worshipped him, and wagged their tails before him.” Jesus tells bystanders that the beasts are better than they are, because the animals “recognize and glorify their Lord.” Indeed, these tales characterize Jesus as a rather haughty boy, conscious of his divinity and not happy with those who treat him as a mere child. At the same time, they depict him as a real child who likes to play. The boy Jesus is childlike in the way he often acts on impulse, not paying much attention to the admonitions of his elders.

His affinity for animals, too, makes him seem childlike. Strikingly, beasts in the apocrypha, beginning with the ox and ass, often seem to realize that Jesus is no ordinary child before human characters do. The legends’ insidious insinuation that many of the Jews around Jesus were not as perceptive as the animals is part of medieval Europe’s widespread antisemitism. In one fifth-century sermon, Quodvultdeus, the bishop of Carthage, asks why the animals’ recognition of Jesus in the manger was not a sufficient sign for the Jews.

In the Bible, Jesus works his first miracle as an adult, at a wedding feast in Cana. The apocryphal tales, however, toy with the idea of the God-man revealing his power early on. The legends suggest that the childishness of Christ distracted many of those around him, preventing them from concluding that he was the Messiah. This allows the apocrypha to avoid contradicting the Bible’s reference to Jesus as simply “the carpenter’s son,” the opposite of a wonder child. Each Christmas, modern Christians in the Western world tend to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, then quickly drop the theme of the Christ child. Medieval Christians, in contrast, were fascinated by tales about the Son of God growing up. Despite acting as a dragon tamer, physician and magician, the young Jesus of the apocrypha largely flies under the radar, cloaking his divinity with “little rascal” boyishness. Mary Dzon, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.