From Byline to Botline: How LLMs Are Quietly Rewriting the News
The AI Pressroom Arrives — Mostly Unannounced When ChatGPT-3.5 launched in late 2022, it didn’t just disrupt classrooms and coding forums — it quietly walked into newsrooms. A recent large-scale study of 40,000+ news articles shows that local and college media outlets, often operating with lean budgets and smaller editorial teams, have embraced generative AI far more than their major-network counterparts. And in many cases, readers have no idea. The research, spanning opinion sections from CNN to The Harvard Crimson, and across formats from print to radio, found a tenfold jump in AI-written local news opinion pieces post-GPT. College newspapers followed closely with an 8.6× increase, while major outlets showed only modest uptake — a testament to stricter editorial controls or more cautious adoption policies. ...