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Authorship of quote selection in AI-assisted news articles

Ascertain whether, in AI-generated or mixed-authorship newspaper articles that contain long quotations, the quotations are selected by human journalists or by large language models during the generation process.

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Background

The paper analyzes quotations within AI-flagged news articles by extracting quotes longer than 50 words and running each through the Pangram detector. Among articles with at least one such quote, 76.1% of AI-flagged articles contain at least one human-written quote, suggesting that many AI-assisted stories incorporate authentic sourced material.

Despite this finding, the authors note they cannot determine who selects the quotes—whether journalists curate them and feed them into prompts or whether selection is performed by the model—leaving the division of labor between human reporters and AI systems unresolved.

References

However, it remains unclear whether journalists are choosing these quotes and feeding them into a prompt for AI generation, or if the AI is also doing quote selection (see \autoref{tab:notable_cases} for examples).

— AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed (2510.18774 - Russell et al., 21 Oct 2025) in Section 3, Analyzing AI use in newspapers — Characterizing AI use in American newspapers, paragraph “Many AI-generated articles contain authentic quotes.”