The Tool For Any Topic? New Study Shows How Newspapers Are Generating Text With AI

It’s no longer news to read about professionals using AI tools to benefit their work.

What does feel more like news, however, is the number of news articles recently discovered to be generated by AI.

Nearly 1 in 10, according to a new study entitled “AI Use In American Newspapers Is Widespread, Uneven, And Rarely Disclosed” by researchers from University of Maryland, UMass Amherst, Microsoft, and Pangram Labs.

“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,” says the study, which analyzed 186,507 articles from 1,528 online newspapers between June 15 and September 15. “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.”

(Photo Source: “AI Use In American Newspapers Is Widespread, Uneven, And Rarely Disclosed” study)

Broken down, 5.24% of the articles were deemed AI-generated, along with 3.98% classified as “mixed,” with human-written and AI-generated parts. For smaller publications, which saw a larger percentage of AI-generated content compared to those with 100,000-plus circulations (9.3% to 1.7%), the study says that discrepancy could be due to limited resources or less-strict “editorial constraints on automation.”

Perhaps most interestingly, the study’s look at three years’ worth of 44,803 opinion pieces from the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times found those opinion pieces were 6.4 times more likely than those publications’ news articles to contain AI-generated content, “with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures.”

“Without clear disclosure standards, readers cannot discern whether AI contributed merely to editing or to greater content generation, restricting readers’ ability to judge the appropriateness of AI in specific articles,” the study says, pointing out that the majority of the 219 opinion-authors with detected articles were “infrequent contributors rather than full-time journalists.”

Reuters Institute recently released statistics showing 21% of consumers are comfortable with their news being created with AI so long as there’s a human in the loop, with that number rising to 43% when news was created by a human with some help from AI. 

The benefits of humans working with AI for back-end journalistic tasks have yet to be fully seen, but those cases get glossed over completely when examples of excessive or sloppy AI reliance take the spotlight.

“Overall,” the study says, “our audit highlights the immediate need for greater transparency and updated editorial standards regarding the use of AI in journalism to maintain public trust.”