The paper also identifies troubling trends related to the prevalence of AI-infused news content and examines AI-produced content on the editorial pages of America's most prestigious newspapers.
Nearly One in Ten Articles Contains AI Text
"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.
AI Use Concentrated in Smaller Local Newspapers
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 relatively limited, with only 1.7% of articles at papers with circulation of more than 100,000 being partially or fully AI-generated.
Corporate Ownership Linked to Higher AI Content
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.
Lack of Transparency in AI-Generated News
Also troubling is that, in most cases, the use of AI-created or AI-infused news was not disclosed to readers.
AI Appears on Opinion Pages of Major Newspapers
AI-generated content was not limited to news coverage; the report also found that AI text surfaced 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-generated content were written by guest contributors, as opposed to regular columnists, the paper found. The research identified 219 opinion articles in 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.
Researchers Call for Greater AI Transparency in Media
"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.
Pangram Launches AI News Monitor to Track Trends
To aid readers and observers of news in finding and tracking trends in the use of AI on news and opinion pages, Pangram is launching an AI News Monitor in conjunction with the report's release. This monitor will regularly update and publicize the data presented in the 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.
*Important notice: arXiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as definitive, used to guide development decisions, or treated as established information in the field of artificial intelligence research.
Source:
Journal reference:
- Preliminary scientific report.
Russell, J., Karpinska, M., Akinode, D., Thai, K., Emi, B., Spero, M., & Iyyer, M. (2025). AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18774