When two former Meta employees dug into why the website of Iowa’s Clayton County Register was spewing dubious posts about stocks, they uncovered a network of sites slinging seemingly AI-made content.
Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles
404 Media reviewed multiple examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News. Google said it doesn't focus on how an article was produced—by an AI or human—opening the way for more AI-generated articles.
How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral — ProPublica
I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC’s fictional website and a search engine that’s thrusting unreliable answers on users.
Report: AI Use in Newspapers Is Widespread, Uneven… | Maryland Today
UMD Computer Scientists, Private Firms Examine News and Opinion Pages in U.S. Media
Google research shows the fast rise of AI-generated misinformation | CBC News
From fake images of war to celebrity hoaxes, AI technology has spawned new forms of reality-warping misinformation online. New analysis co-authored by Google researchers shows just how quickly the problem has grown.
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 fully AI-generated. This AI use is unevenly distributed, appearing more frequently in smaller, local outlets, in specific topics such as weather and technology, and within certain ownership groups. We also analyze 45K opinion pieces from Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, finding that they are 6.4 times more likely to contain AI-generated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures. Despite this prevalence, we find that AI use is rarely disclosed: a manual audit of 100 AI-flagged articles found only five disclosures of AI use. Overall, our audit highlights the immediate need for greater transparency and updated editorial standards regarding the use of AI in journalism to maintain public trust.
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 fully AI-generated. This AI use is unevenly distributed, appearing more frequently in smaller, local outlets, in specific topics such as weather and technology, and within certain ownership groups. We also analyze 45K opinion pieces from Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, finding that they are 6.4 times more likely to contain AI-generated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures. Despite this prevalence, we find that AI use is rarely disclosed: a manual audit of 100 AI-flagged articles found only five disclosures of AI use. Overall, our audit highlights the immediate need for greater transparency and updated editorial standards regarding the use of AI in journalism to maintain public trust.
Tracking AI-enabled Misinformation: 3,749 AI Content Farm sites (and Counting), Plus the Top False Claims Generated by Artificial Intelligence Tools
Coverage by McKenzie Sadeghi, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Virginia Padovese, Giulia Pozzi, Sara Badilini, Chiara Vercellone, Natalie Huet, Zack Fishman, Leonie Pfaller, and Natalie Adams | Last Updated June 23, 2026
Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena
<p>Download the pdf here. Executive Summary Despite growing interest, the effects of AI on the news industry and our information environment — the public arena — remain poorly understood. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications of the news industry’s dependence on technology companies for AI. Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers […]</p>
An AI-Generated Content Empire Is Spreading Fake Celebrity Images on Google
A ring of websites using AI and run by an aspiring movie star are behind fake celebrity images featured in Google results, Motherboard found.
An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned
The incident is yet another example of volunteer Wikipedia editors fighting to keep the world’s largest repository of human knowledge free of AI-generated slop.
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
By mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted.
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated
Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web.
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative...
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative...
Google’s broken link to the web
With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background
