The University of Maryland researchers, using AI detection from Pangram, found that more than 9% of all news coverage contained AI-generated text, while AI text has also appeared on the opinion pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

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.

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Researchers from University of Maryland, using AI detection from Pangram, found that more than 9% of all news coverage contained AI-generated text. The study 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. Among other papers, nearly one in ten (9.3%) were shown to contain significant AI content. See more about the data at Pangram’s AI News Monitor: https://www.pangram.com/ai-news.

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, nine percent, is surprising, but what we also found about where, and perhaps why, this was happening ought to be concerning,” he said.

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, Max Spero, and Bradley Emi with Pangram.

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.” The paper further states, "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,” he said.

About Pangram

Pangram Labs is the technology leader in AI detection systems, surpassing other detection providers in accuracy, reliability, and information delivery. Pangram’s detection systems are relied on by thousands of businesses, primarily for assessing and addressing public reviews of products and services, many of which are compromised by AI. Founded by classmates at Stanford University, Pangram is gaining market traction in education as the accuracy alternative for assessing the authenticity of student work.

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"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."