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The odds that the New York Times and other major news outlets have published AI-generated articles — whether knowing it or not — seem very high indeed.
Speculation abounded on this possibility earlier this week, centering on a “Modern Love” column published in the NYT last November. It was sparked when on X, Becky Tuch of Lit Mag News posted an excerpt of the piece with her controversial take: “this reads EXACTLY like AI slop,” she wrote.
Turns out there’s evidence that Tuch was onto something, a new piece in The Atlantic reveals.
The writer of the column, Kate Gilgan, told magazine that she hadn’t copy and pasted language from an AI model, but “did utilize AI as a tool,” including chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, for seeking “inspiration and guidance and correction.”
“I used AI as a collaborative editor and not as a content generator,” Gilgan insisted.
At this point in the AI boom, when we know that AI’s effects on its users are often much farther-reaching than they realize, this feels like a thin distinction to make. In the process of constantly consulting a chatbot, it seems inevitable that its style and form could rub off on you.
And the scale may be imposing. Controversies like those surrounding Gilgan’s column inspired several AI researchers to go back and see how much AI material has crept into American newspapers.
Using an AI-detection tool from the startup Pangram Labs, their findings, published as a preprint study in October, should raise alarm. They suggest that nine percent of newly-published articles are either partially or fully AI-generated, mostly in smaller, local outlets.
But when they focused on opinion pieces in “newspapers of records” including, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, they found that these were over six times more likely to contain AI-generated content than articles that came out of their newsroom.
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