To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem . The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data to back up the anecdotal evidence. A new preprint study published today from researchers at the Imperial College of London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive found that approximately 35 percent of all new websites are either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The same study also found that online writing is “increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.” In other words, AI is making the internet fake-happy. The research team tried four different approaches to AI detection before settling on tools from Pangram Labs after it delivered the most consistent results.…