AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed
Jenna Russell University of Maryland, College Park, Marzena Karpinska Simon Fraser University, Destiny Akinode Pangram Labs, James Zhou, Katherine Thai Pangram, Bradley Emi Pangram Labs, Max Spero Pangram Labs, Mohit Iyyer University of Maryland, College Park
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. A factuality analysis shows AI-generated articles are 8.2 times more likely to contain hallucinated claims than human-written news. 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.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表