publications

2025

1. Echoes of Automation: The Increasing Use of LLMs in Newsmaking

   Abolfazl Ansari, Delvin Ce Zhang, Nafis Irtiza Tripto, and Dongwon Lee

   arXiv preprintarXiv:2508.06445. To appear in SBP-BRiMS 2025 and Springer-Nature LNCS series , Aug 2025

   18th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Carnegie Mellon University

   Abs DOI Bib HTML PDF

   The rapid rise of Generative AI (GenAI), particularly LLMs, poses concerns for journalistic integrity and authorship. This study examines AI-generated content across over 40,000 news articles from major, local, and college news media, in various media formats. Using three advanced AI-text detectors (e.g., Binoculars, Fast-Detect GPT, and GPTZero), we find substantial increase of GenAI use in recent years, especially in local and college news. Sentence-level analysis reveals LLMs are often used in the introduction of news, while conclusions usually written manually. Linguistic analysis shows GenAI boosts word richness and readability but lowers formality, leading to more uniform writing styles, particularly in local media.

   @article{ansari2025echoes,
     title = {Echoes of Automation: The Increasing Use of LLMs in Newsmaking},
     author = {Ansari, Abolfazl and Zhang, Delvin Ce and Tripto, Nafis Irtiza and Lee, Dongwon},
     journal = {arXiv preprint},
     year = {2025},
     month = aug,
     pages = {1--20},
     publisher = {arXiv},
     doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2508.06445},
     url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06445},
     note = {18th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, \& Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Carnegie Mellon University}
   }