In the past couple of months, many social media platforms have claimed that some major news websites have been publishing articles that have been generated by AI and not labeling them as AI written. These posts can often be labeled by lesser known news outlets and are norming generic like "breaking news" stories that don't really have an author byline or odd phrasing. Some of this talk has been boosted up by users worried about how AI might reduce journalism standards.
While some of this may be true, there are many littler sites and some news websites are using AI generated content. For example, a study from Cornell shows that synthetic news articles increased drastically on smaller sites between 2022-2023 but many mainstream news sources still had a lower usage of AI content. So that means this claim is misleading and conflates the real question on whether AI written content with a broad assertion that major outlets are doing it in secrecy and at a scale when evidence is lacking.
