We also track how AI adoption has evolved over time:
Among 10 veteran reporters we followed longitudinally, AI use rose from 0% pre-ChatGPT (2022) to >40% in 2025.

AI is disproportionately affecting news written in languages other than English. Roughly ~8% of English news is AI-generated, compared to 33% of non-English languages (primarily Spanish). Without disclosure, we cannot be sure whether AI is translating stories or writing them.

In NYT, WaPo & WSJ, opinion sections show 6.4× higher AI use than other sections, rising ~25× since 2022 (from ~0% → ~4%).
AI use is concentrated among prominent guest authors: politicians, CEOs, and scientists.

AI use isn’t evenly distributed:
🗞️ Far higher in small local papers than national outlets
🌎 Especially common in Mid-Atlantic & Southern states
🏢 Largely Driven by ownership groups (e.g. Boone Newsmedia & Advance Publications)
🧭 Most concentrated in weather, tech, and health

AI is already at work in American newsrooms.

We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea.

Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism:

What they get wrong: ❌

Sometimes, humans get tripped up by:
📚 Common "AI vocab" words in human-written texts
✍️ Grammar mistakes they assume "AI wouldn’t make"
🌀🗣️ One expert was often fooled by o1's use of informal language - like slang, contractions, and colloquialisms.

What experts get right: ✅

They spot telltale signs of AI, like:
📚 "AI Vocab" (delve, crucial, vibrant ...)
🔄 Predictable sentence structure
🗨️ Quotes that feel too polished

For human-written content, they look for:
🎨 Creativity
🎭 Stylistic quirks
🌊 A natural & clear flow

Across GPT-4o, Claude, and o1 articles, experts correctly identified 99.3% of AI-generated content without misclassifying any human-written articles.🕵️‍♀️

Among automatic detectors, Pangram significantly outperformed the rest, missing only a few more texts than the experts. 🔍⚡

We asked experts - ranging from beginners to ChatGPT pros - to decide if articles were human-written or AI-generated.

They highlighted potential clues 🔎 in the text and explained why they made their decisions. 🧠

People often claim they know when ChatGPT wrote something, but are they as accurate as they think?

Turns out that while general population is unreliable, those who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks can spot even "humanized" AI-generated text with near-perfect accuracy 🎯