Robot typing on a typewriter vector illustration

(Getty Images)

the botted line

Reading an article online? It’s now a coin flip whether it was authored by a human or AI

Not this one, though.

Ahh yes, it’s another great day to be someone who writes words for an online audience. I’m sure I won’t come across any news on the internet likely to send me into an existential spiral about my career choices…

According to new figures from AI-powered SEO company Graphite, cited by Axios on Tuesday, artificial intelligence is now behind more online articles than humans, as the internet groans under the weight of bot-generated content more broadly. Yes, while OpenAI’s latest text-to-video generation model, Sora 2, has at once been captivating and horrifying audiences in recent weeks, AI has been starting to dominate the world of online writing for months now.

AI-generated articles chart — Sherwood News

Rather than just totting up the amount of em dashes in the piece or checking if Margaux Blanchard cropped up in the byline, Graphite used AI detection software across a sample of 65,000 English-language online articles and listicles to gather the data. The company determined that examples mostly or wholly written by AI were outweighing human-authored versions as early as November 2024, almost exactly two years on from the launch of ChatGPT.

Our analysis of the same dataset suggests that the two have been roughly equal ever since, though it’s hard to imagine that staying the case for too long. That’s especially true when you consider that, contrary to what you might expect, researchers at MIT have found that “content generated by generative AI and augmented AI is perceived as of higher quality than that produced by human experts,” according to humans in blind test conditions.

Rani Molla2m

Meta announces new Texas data center, partnership with Arm

Meta announced today it’s breaking ground on a new “AI-optimized” data center in El Paso, Texas that will scale to 1GW. That’s not to be confused with the city-sized AI data center it’s building in Louisiana that’s expected to scale to 5GW.

In other Meta AI data center news, Reuters reports that Meta is also partnering with chip tech provider Arm Holdings for “data center platforms to power its AI ranking and recommendation systems, which are key to discovery and personalization across its apps.” The partnership also likely represents an effort to diversify away from Nvidia chips.

Meta is expected to spend up to $72 billion in capex this year, as it amps up AI-related infrastructure projects.

Breaking Ground on Our New AI-Optimized Data Center in El Paso

Meta is expected to spend up to $72 billion in capex this year, as it amps up AI-related infrastructure projects.

Jon Keegan3h

Report: OpenAI scrambles to find new revenue in its 5-year business plan

After a flurry of enormous (and confusing) deals, OpenAI has committed to spending more than $1 trillion with various partners in the AI ecosystem. Now it has to figure out how to pay for it all.

The Financial Times has some details of OpenAI’s five-year business plan and how it’s exploring “creative” ideas to secure more capital.

Among the elements of the plan:

Online advertising
Revenue from shopping tools
Jony Ive-designed AI gadget sales
Selling access to Stargate cloud computing
Bespoke products for governments and businesses
New sales from Sora and ChatGPT
New fundraising rounds

OpenAI is currently pulling in $13 billion in annual recurring revenue, with 70% of that coming from consumer ChatGPT subscriptions, according to the report. But it also plans on burning $115 billion through 2029.

OpenAI makes five-year business plan to meet $1tn spending pledges

bafkreihggvmz5ztombrhmd65msikqlf72aoot4pus6q2t7vuiwk43ptzdm

Among the elements of the plan:

Online advertising
Revenue from shopping tools
Jony Ive-designed AI gadget sales
Selling access to Stargate cloud computing
Bespoke products for governments and businesses
New sales from Sora and ChatGPT
New fundraising rounds

Google’s Waymo plans to launch autonomous rides in London next year

This marks the company’s second international expansion after Tokyo.

Rani Molla8h

$100M

Jon Keegan22h

Salesforce is using AI to to handle customer service, and it’s saving the company $100 million per year, CEO Marc Benioff said at the company’s Dreamforce conference, per Bloomberg reporting. Benioff also announced that 12,000 customers are using its “Agentforce” AI-driven customer service platform.

$100 million seems impressive, but to put that number in perspective, last quarter, the company reported over $10 billion in revenue.

Benioff has enthusiastically embraced the use of AI and has slashed thousands of positions as the company automates roles.

Jon Keegan23h

Sam Altman says OpenAI fixed ChatGPT’s serious mental health issues in just a month. Anyway, here comes the erotica

Well that was quick. Just over a month ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a 120-day plan to roll out new protections for identifying and helping ChatGPT users who are suffering a mental health crisis, after a series of reports brought attention to such users harming themselves and others after using the company’s AI chatbot.

Today, Altman says the company has built new tools to address these issues and “mitigated” these problems.

Altman is so confident that they’ve addressed mental health safety that the company is reverting ChatGPT’s behavior so it “behaves more like what people liked about 4o.” Altman essentially apologized to users for the changes that were made to address mental health problems that arose with use of the chatbot:

“We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.”

Separately, the company announced the members of its Expert Council on Well-Being and AI, an eight-person council of mental health experts.

As a reward for the adults who aren’t suffering mental health issues exacerbated by confiding in the chatbot, Altman says that erotica is on the way.

“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

In response to Altman’s post on X, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley quoted Altman’s post with this message:

“You made ChatGPT ‘pretty restrictive’? Really. Is that why it has been recommending kids harm and kill themselves?”

Sam Altman on X: "We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. " / X

Sam Altman on X: "We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right. Now that we have" / X