Extent of AI-created content in American news and opinion pages revealed

A new research study released today finds that more than 9% of all news in U.S. newspapers contains at least some AI-created text.

The paper also finds troubling trends related to where AI-infused news content is most common, and also examines AI-produced content on the editorial pages of America’s most prestigious papers.

“We were able to examine 186,000 articles published by 1,500 newspapers this year and found that nearly one in ten had at least some AI-created content,” said Max Spero, one of the paper’s authors and co-founder of the AI transparency company Pangram, which provided the technology for the research. “The overall number, 9%, is surprising, but what we also found about where, and perhaps why, this was happening ought to be concerning.”

The paper was co-authored by Jenna Russell and Mohit Iyyer of the University of Maryland, Marzena Karpinska at Microsoft, and Destiny Akinode, Katherine Thai, Spero, and Bradley Emi with Pangram. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

The paper finds that “AI use in published articles is increasingly common yet rarely disclosed. In our recent news dataset, 9.1% of articles are labeled by Pangram as either AI-generated or mixed.

“Digging deeper, we observe that AI usage is unevenly distributed: it is much higher in smaller local outlets than nationally-circulated papers, and particularly concentrated in the mid-Atlantic and southern U.S. states.”

The paper found correlation between communities without a major, large circulation newspaper and increased frequency of AI-created text in news articles. In fact, the paper found that AI-use on the news pages of major daily papers was quite limited—only 1.7% of articles at papers with circulation of more than 100,000 are partially or fully AI-generated.

Examination of AI-created or AI-containing news articles also showed correlation to news owners, with some major companies’ papers containing significant AI content. “Boone News Media has the highest percentage of partial or complete AI-content detected (20.9%), well above the second highest, Advance Publications (13.4%),” the paper found.

“This disparity—that communities served by smaller papers and some corporate owners get more AI-made content than people in larger cities with bigger papers or different owner groups—is worrying, and may be a consequence of collapsing news economies, the result of news deserts,” said Emi, co-founder of Pangram.

Also troubling is that, in most cases, the use of AI-created or AI-infused news was not disclosed to readers.

AI-generated content was not limited to news coverage, the report also found—surfacing AI-text on the opinion pages of three significant newspapers—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Although the use of AI in these pages was small, just 4.5% overall, it was nonetheless significantly more common than AI use on the news pages of those outlets (0.7%). Most of the opinion articles containing AI content were from guest contributors as opposed to regular columnists, the paper found. The research identified 219 opinion articles at these three papers containing AI content.

“Opinion articles published at the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ are 6.4 times more likely to contain AI use than contemporaneous news articles from the same three newspapers,” the paper found.

“Understanding the origins of our news is important, even vital, to being safe, informed, and able to make good decisions,” said Spero. “With the media and technology landscapes shifting rapidly and significantly, keeping our fingers on the pulse of news creation is essential,” he said.

To aid in helping readers and observers of news find and track trends in the use of AI in news and opinion pages, and to coincide with the release of the report, Pangram is also launching an AI News Monitor, which will regularly update and publicize the data in this initial report.

“We’re not a one-and-done on this topic,” Spero said. “Transparency in AI use is a core value for us, and we’re invested in getting good information about AI to people, especially when it comes to news and commentary.”

Provided by
Pangram