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AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

AI is rapidly transforming journalism, but the extent of its use in published newspaper articles remains unclear. We address this gap by auditing a large-scale dataset of 186K articles from online editions of 1.5K American newspapers published in the summer of 2025. Using Pangram, a state-of-the-art AI detector, we discover that approximately 9% of newly-published articles are either partially or fully AI-generated. This AI use is unevenly distributed, appearing more frequently in smaller, local outlets, in specific topics such as weather and technology, and within certain ownership groups. We also analyze 45K opinion pieces from Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, finding that they are 6.4 times more likely to contain AI-generated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures. Despite this prevalence, we find that AI use is rarely disclosed: a manual audit of 100 AI-flagged articles found only five disclosures of AI use. Overall, our audit highlights the immediate need for greater transparency and updated editorial standards regarding the use of AI in journalism to maintain public trust.

years

2026 5 2025 1

representative citing papers

Evaluating Commercial AI Chatbots as News Intermediaries

cs.CL · 2026-05-21 · conditional · novelty 7.0

Commercial AI chatbots reach over 90% multiple-choice accuracy on recent news facts but lose 11-17% in free response and drop to 19-70% on subtle false-premise questions, with retrieval failures causing most errors and clear Anglophone bias.

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet

cs.CY · 2026-04-14 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

By mid-2025 roughly 35% of new websites are AI-generated or AI-assisted, correlating with lower semantic diversity and higher positive sentiment but showing no significant drop in factual accuracy or stylistic diversity.

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