However, the proliferation of questionable content is likely one of the reasons why people no longer view the internet as a fully trustworthy source of information.
For example, according to a survey of 2,000 adults in the United States, less than half of what they see and read online is believed to be accurate, and this level of skepticism is at an all-time high.
Americans believe only 41% of what they consume online is accurate, fact-based, and created by a real human.
In fact, respondents believe that 23% of online content is completely false and intentionally misleading, while over a third (36%) falls somewhere in between.
Three-quarters say they trust the internet less today than ever before.
At the same time, 78% agree that the internet has “never been worse” when it comes to distinguishing between what’s real and what’s artificial.
To put the survey’s findings into perspective, consider this: the average American comes across information they know—or at least suspect—was generated by AI about five times per week, with 15% saying it happens more than 10 times.
Social media posts (48%), news articles (34%), and chatbots (32%) are seen as the top three sources most likely to contain AI-generated or misleading content.
In fact, those surveyed believe that about half (50%) of the news stories and articles they encounter online contain some element of AI, whether in the images or the text.
Despite their suspicions, fewer than a third (31%) say they are confident in their ability to distinguish between AI-generated and human-written text.
To test this, researchers showed participants a set of business reviews and asked them to identify whether each one had been written by a human or generated by AI. Only three in 10 respondents (30%) were able to correctly determine which reviews were AI-generated and which were written by people, confirming their concerns.
In fact, two of the three human-written reviews ranked at the very bottom of the list, highlighting just how easy it has become to be fooled online.
Why is that? A study published in Nature Human Behaviour suggests that the combination of information overload and our limited attention spans plays a major role in what spreads online.
The researchers found only a weak link between the quality of content and its popularity. In other words, in digital spaces flooded with information, low-quality posts can be just as likely to go viral as high-quality ones.
Plus, seeing too much information — for example, in the form of a constant flow of posts in the news feed — can also affect cognition. Confirmation bias, or our tendency to share information that supports our beliefs, is exacerbated on social networks because we often don’t have the time to properly analyze every incoming post and tend to pay attention only to the ones we already like or agree with.
